The Italian Institute of Culture is delighted to be part of the 2022 edition of Belfast Photo Festival – the largest annual festival of international photography in the UK and Ireland.
In this edition the Belfast Photo Festival is exploring untold stories, under-represented narratives and perspectives on the world that too often go unseen. Celebrating photography that pushes against dominant social, cultural, historical and visual frameworks, this year’s festival features the work of artists who find themselves—both conceptually and aesthetically—on the verge of new territories.
How to Raise a Hand is a work shaped by mourning and by the finding of a box containing 313 cutout photographs of the artist’s dead father’s fingers. This discovery led Angelo Vignali to reshape this material to restore a dialogue with his father, bringing back his presence through his hands. Moving between touch and vision, he gave life to a play that suggests an intimacy, which – despite not being able to experience it directly – he could restore thanks to a collaboration between imagination and haptics, drawing from memory.
The work uses archival photography, performance and sculpture to explore the themes of family, memory and loss. It is a search and longing for identity. Identity distinguishes us from each other and makes us unique and peculiar from a biological, psychological and cultural point of view. But what if we are more similar than what we can imagine? What if our bond to whom we have lost is more substantial than we can imagine? Do the departed live within us, not only in our memories but physically embedded and multiplied in the shape of our bodies?
Born in 1987, Angelo Vignali lives and works in Milan. His work investigates how memory and time relate to each other through images and how this relationship influences our perception of reality. He works using different media: archival material, installation, sculpture and photography. Vignali de-contextualises and re-organises images and narration in his projects, creating new, alternative meanings and approaching personal narration as a creative process. He published ‘Flattened in Time and Space’ (2020) and ‘How to Raise a Hand’ (2022) with the publisher Witty Books. His work has been exhibited at the MAR Museum of Art in Ravenna (Italy), ISSP(Latvia), Photo London (UK), Images Gibellina (Italy), and Mucho Mas!Gallery (Italy).