Photo-books • Bazzar • Foto-knjiga
During BPM book 2022 we will be presenting several talks based around the theme of photo books. In addition to these presentations on books, by both authors and publishers from across Europe, there will be a fantastic three-day workshop and a photo book market.
This is the first time that we have presented a photo book market in Belgrade and for this very special occasion we have invited several publishers to participate: The Angry Bat (Slovenia), Fraglich Publishing (Austria), Fuego Books (Spain), Grain (Serbia), Pure Land/Footnote (UK/Serbia), Witty Books (Italy) and various people who have self-published their own books, including: Dušan Đorđević, Inés D’Orey, Katarina Radović, Siniša Vlajković, Vuk VIdor and more to be added!
The photo book market will take place at Dorćol Platz in Koska Bar and will be held over a full weekend 21/5 – 22/5/2022, from 12:00 to 17:00, as a closing event for this first edition of BPM book 2022.
Thank you to the Embassy of Austria in Belgrade, Austrijski kulturni forum Beograd, Embassy of Spain in Belgrade, Instituto Cervantes de Belgrado, Istituto Italiano di Cultura Belgrado for their help and support.
The Angry Bat is a publishing imprint created by Slovenian photographer Matej Sitar in 2012. The presentation will focus on the publications of the publishing house, the workflow and also the Maribor photo-book award, which is being organised by The Angry Bat biannually.
The Angry Bat is the publishing trademark of Slovenian photographer Matej Sitar. Its goal for the future is to publish as many limited edition photo-books as possible.
The Angry Bat aims to bring much joy to all book-lovers who value independently produced artist books of beautiful quality.
The conversation will be conducted in English.
Inês d’Orey
Beograd Concrete
In addition to exhibiting at Belgrade Photo Month 2021, Inês d’Orey participated in an artist residency in the Serbian capital at the Footnote Centre for Image and Text, where she developed the series “Beograd Concrete” based around the modernist and brutalist architecture present in this region of the world. The residence was supported by the Embassy of Portugal in Serbia. “Beograd Concrete” book is published by Galeria das Salgadeiras, with the support of “Garantir Cultura” programme by the Ministery of Culture from Portugal and “PORTO” city hall programme. The book was designed by Leonel Duarte and the editorial coordination of Cláudio Garrudo.
The research proposed for this residency, which is deeply in line with Inês d’Orey’s artistic work, is related to architecture and the identity that this gives to the territory where it operates, as had already happened in other cities such as Lisbon, Porto, Copenhagen and Tokyo. In the case of Belgrade, she was particularly interested in the mixture of styles and architectural references she found in the city, where public buildings built between 1946 and 1980 and other housing or office buildings dating from the First World War, when Yugoslavia was formed, intersect.
In the book of the same name, curator Andreia Garcia says: “In this journey through images, let us understand ourselves as passive subjects, just like the architects of the past, without losing the sense of the gaze, but reinforcing it over the gaze from the photograph that takes away the current and factual point of view about the definition of time, one that does not start from the tabula rasa, that does not go back to zero to understand or write what happens, but rather announces the changes that allow for advancement.” By crossing recent events in the history of this country, which now has Serbia as its name, it is also possible to understand, or try to understand, the impact that political programmes have, or can have, on the identity and architecture of its cities.
This conversation will be conducted in English.
Memento Mori
Memento mori is a reminder of the inevitable nature of death. The exhibition is a kind of homage to the memento mori direction in renaissance painting. Death means oblivion, one is dead when nobody remembers them.
Photo exibition and special dummy edition.
(8 photos 120x85cm, lightbox)
Siv I – The Time Capsule
The time capsule is a historic cache of important goods or information intended as a method of communication with future generations. Most often it is a small metal box buried or put aside to be opened or accessed many years later. Numerous capsules were buried marking historic events, placed in corner-stones of important buildings or even sent into space. They are to be opened on a day in the distant future. The time capsules are meant to help future generations understand the world of a bygone time.
These photos are part of the bigger exhibition about the Federal Executive Council and the book.
(6 photos 135x90cm)
Fuego BooksGustavo Alemán, editor at Fuego Books, will talk about his experience of becoming an editor after being a published photographer. From small personal stories, to international homages to David Lynch, he will explain the philosophy and the books of Fuego Books.
Publishing photobooks is a complex affair. Choosing the right project to publish, assembling a team, and dealing with all the aspects of bookmaking. This is a complex web of decisions that spans from the design and sequencing of the photobook, its pre-press and printing, to the distribution and showcasing of the final work. In this talk, Spanish editor Gustavo Alemán will recount his experiences and offer practical advice in all the phases of the process to those photo enthusiasts and future editors that are interested in following a similar route.
This presentation has been organised through the essential support of Embassy of Spain in Belgrade and the Instituto Cervantes in Belgrade.
Witty Books is an independent publishing house founded in 2012 (previously named Witty Kiwi) with the intention of promoting contemporary photography and visual culture. In fact, in addition to publishing, it pays considerable attention to image education through workshops and masterclasses. During almost ten years of activity Witty Books has collaborated with young and established artists, from all over the world.
Tommaso Parrillo (1989) studied photography at the Fine Arts Academy in Naples. In 2012 he founded the publishing house Witty Books and in the 2015 he become co-founder of Jest, an exhibition space about photography. He currently lives in Turin and work as a publisher, curator and educator.
This presentation has been organised through the essential support of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Belgrado.
This conversation will be conducted in English.
The Missing Eye
Mattia Parodi and Piergiorgio Sorgetti
Curator Tommaso Parrillo
Recent studies published on Cognitive Brain Research have demonstrated, using instruments that measure dream activity, that people blind since birth dream in images. Several hypotheses suggest that these representations are a result of the collaboration between the activity of the visual cortex and the activity of other sensory organs, however it isn’t excluded that the human being has an innate visual memory, parallel and pre-existing to that which develops through the retinal system. Some images seem to be independent from the visual apparatus and even though they appear in dreams, it is still possible to see them.
With which eye do we perceive them?
The Missing Eye is a research that turns the photographic device to visual projections that aren’t deduced from our immediate experience of reality but are the result of the combination of different cognitive paths in which all senses participate in sight. The gaze dissolves itself and the eye becomes a changing object of our perceptions, an abstract organ capable of processing images beyond retinal impulses. The photographic gesture captures the visual mechanism and transcends it, bringing attention to the typical transfigurative mental visions of the dream, sunk in memory and relegated to the unconscious.
Thank you to the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Belgrado for their help and support.
* Galleries and exhibition spaces retain the right to change the date and time of the exhibitions and other events
