Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost: three unpublished projects by three artist photographers - Diego Artioli, Ziyah Gafić and Ludwig Thalheimer - tell the story of the places and the people who fled from these places, arrived there or resisted them. Between a documentary style and an artistic approach, the series of exhibitions revolves around the relationship between the photographic language and the concept of “lost land” from which the title of the series derives.

After the Bosnian Ziyah Gafić, eighty unpublished shots by Diego Artioli, aka “Escapist”, are on display.

The works are a photo story of a journey undertaken by Artioli in Syria in the spring of 2013. Children and adults from the Idlib region, in the north-western area of Syria, placed themselves in front of the lens of Artioli, who arrived in those territories with a volunteer for the non-profit association Syrian Children Relief. Having left to document the activities of the association, Artioli traveled by car, as an illegal immigrant, across the Turkish-Syrian border, witnessed a bombing and met some groups of fighters who also posed for him.
The cut is documentary for clear and powerful shots. Among the rubble and remains of a territory marked by war, all the dignified humanity of the inhabitants emerges, which in the eyes of children still finds space for glimmers of hope and play.
The images follow one another in a loop on a monitor, a sort of silent monolith in the center of the space, while in the background is the photograph of a bombed and rubble building, which completely covers the internal walls of the Cube.

Diego Artioli was born in Bolzano to a Spanish mother and a father from Mantua. He lived in Bologna, Germany, Greece. He currently lives between Trieste and Bolzano. Alpine. His photos have appeared in the “Financial Times”, “El País”, “Stile”, “Lucky Peach”, “Visionaire”. He has exhibited in Italy and Spain. For Bompiani he published the book entitled “The seas of Trieste”. He has held conferences on the “Role of the image in communication”, but he still doesn’t understand in what capacity.