Photography, since its first appearance, continuously enters the flow of human relationships, establishing continuous points of contact between past and present. His mediation is continuous.
Even if - as the sociologist Aldo Bonomi argues - the word relationship is a sweet word and today it has become heavy because it is linked to the anguish that derives from the crisis of ties, photography manages to establish relationships with memory, with the contemporary, it is able to talk to oneself and one's body, to reality and to imagination.
Ragusa Foto Festival through exhibitions and events offers a visual narrative that represents some of the different relationships that characterize the flow of life, with people, between generations, with the nature, with the territory. The message of the visual path of the eleventh edition is meant to be a creative contribution to invite to accompany the value of human relationships with every personal, social, political, civil, economic and environmental choice.
Already in the 90s the art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, in response to the growing disintegration of sociality, believed that art was able to respond to this discomfort. Today human contacts have sunk even further. Our relationships risk being replaced by the various connections that constitute what the philosopher Emanuele Coccia defines as "corridors of intimacy” with reference to the many "digital living rooms". Due to its interactive role, in the digital present, images are experienced, for example, as an object of exchange on social networks, which lead us to reflect on how photography contributes to creating and nurturing social relationships; as well as witnessing the loss of effectiveness of the institutions that were supposed to peacefully regulate international relations, it confirms a sad paradigm that we believed by now relegated to the history books. Photography has the powerful role of being an immediate opportunity for relationship. And due to its ability to bring the point of view of the other, the 2023 edition offers food for thought on the state of relationships, on the different aspects and models, at all levels, stable or transitory.
Starting from the need to go through this difficult epochal passage and to metabolise the effects of the metamorphoses experienced in recent years, this year we ask for a dutiful cultural reflection on human relationships in which photography is almost always present and plays an important role. It opens up to new meaningful relationships, o sometimes cry out a malaise that has no name and clarity and seek consolation in images of the past or future ideals.