Finally, after months of intense work, here I am talking about a project that once seemed impossible. This week, in Turin, I attended the opening of EXPOSED, the Torino Foto Festival. Months ago, Salvatore Vitale and Menno Liauw invited us to conceive the identity of this new festival and generally take over the artistic direction. At first there was nothing, not even a name. Therefore, I feel particularly connected to this project: every detail, including the name of the festival, is the result of a lot of work.
The idea of the festival came from the desire to attract a new audience to Turin and to create a contemporary event dedicated to photography. Starting from this vision, we reflected on the identity of the festival and its unique atmosphere.
Having launched a completely new festival, we faced many challenges: few people, limited budget, and a lot of confusion. The project involved the UNSTATED team and other collaborators, totaling at least six people. The identity of the festival was designed to reflect the diversity of photography, embracing a wide variety of expressions such as satellites, artificial intelligence, photo archives, scanning, X-rays, photogrammetry, and more. This was our initial dream.
However, we soon ran up against the realities of politics, artists and audiences, which forced us to scale back our expectations and use more accessible materials. In the identity of the festival, we also tried to evoke the concept of widgets, such as clocks, calendars and compasses, to visually communicate the international variety of artists, the richness of the events and the venues involved. I don't know if it fully succeeded--the time available and the volume of work didn't often allow us to delve into these issues that we hoped for.
I would like to reflect not so much on the specific project, but rather on the initial expectation that one has at the start of each project and the reality that then manifests itself in the course and at the end of the work. We have done everything: videos, motion graphics, website, catalogs, posters, exhibitions... so many things that in the end turned out to be very different from our original expectations. Don't get me wrong, the result was outstanding and impactful, but simply different, often in a more simplistic way than we had hoped.
So I wonder if there will ever come a time when, at the beginning of a project, expectations will be perfectly aligned with reality and the end result. Or is it perhaps better that way? Is it normal to begin a project by imagining the best possible outcome, keeping expectations high so as not to limit oneself from the start?
Spending days in Turin, seeing all the work accomplished and experiencing it in person made me realize how difficult it is to fully perceive the effort expended, even for those who, like me and the team, worked directly on the project. I wonder if there is a way for projects of this size to fully perceive their creative value. Is it worth investing so much effort and care in every detail? My answer is yes, and honestly I'm very grateful to have had this opportunity.
Thank you to the whole team and thank you for the trust