The BTR-Sat tv-station broadcast all over Europe satellite television programs from its seat in Shukta (Macedonia), tenth municipality of the city of Skopje, and the first and only city-hall in the world, recognized institutionally by nationals of Roma origin. This place, therefore, has become now the destination and haven for Roma men and women from all European and Balkan, who will find a place where to realize their own home, but especially in the area need to root and transmit their culture and identity.
The Btr broadcasts programs of entertainment and information 24 hours a day, has about 30 staff based on three work shifts, and it supports thanks to the activism of its owner and manager; the television network is also responsible for the organization of annual events such as festivals, beauty contests and music festivals and film, more and internationally, in Romanes language and reserved for the Roma.
Created to develop the information and disclosure of Roma culture, a people no longer nomadic but that remains to this day without their land, nor can not find place in the new political and economic geography, BTR-TV arrive into the homes of the Roma thus creating a shared imaginary vision, necessary to build a “new geography” even for those who are outside the boundaries of the community.
Q&A with Davide Palmisano & Manuela Marchetti
Photography is…
Davide: The photography for me is the tool through which I try to represent the reality or fragments of it as I perceive it and I interpret it in its essentiality; the photography is a tool through which I try to stimulate the observer, inclusive me, to the feelings and to recall him to the emotional life.
Manuela: The matter of photography is total joining of people and environment, across human relationships.
Photography and writing…
Davide: A necessary linguistic marriage.
Manuela: I like telling stories with words and images.
Who left the biggest impression on you?
Davide: Curiosity of Diane Arbus and fantasy of Jules Verne, but in documentary photography I love work of Alec Soth and Lee Friedlander.
Manuela: Philosophical thought of Plato and colours and forms of Kandisky’s paints.
Tell us a little about yourself
Davide & Manuela: We are an Italian couple, in life and in photojournalistic activity; we’ve mixed extraction, technical and humanistic, and we are oriented to photographic narrative of contemporary stories and documentation ph.; we have made so far with a certain freedom of expression by owning the means of subsistence independent of this activity. Operationally, we make our services work usually side by side, or individually concern for specific topics, we made reports on topics of travel, tourism, social customs, but also personal and human storytelling, even autobiographical.
Davide Palmisano (website), I was born in Catania 42 years ago, i live in Trento now since 18 years, I’ve got passion for photography since I was 15 years old, but only recently have I discovered the real possibilities offered by photography and as an adult I’ve finally concentrated on thematic projects. I am not a professional photographer but I photograph for passion and often for a personal and intimate necessity to express myself.
In my photography I prefer the search of the suggestion; I try to provoke a state of mind, my photo must be the expression of what I feel when I observe, a kind of inner landscape. I love using my photography to make a statement about this world and the people in it.
Manuela Marchetti (website), born in Rome live in Trento always. Daughter of the sixties, I went through these decades of important social gains, illusions and disillusions, observing and experiencing life’s changes. I like to tell with words and images, penetrate into the relationship between people and the environment by investigating the man in the social reality in which first acts and, at the same time suffers, in an evolutionary continuum.
