Photo exhibition: Alessandro Penso “Lesvos”
Venue: Centro di Documentazione of Palau, Palau, Italy
from 08-09-2016 to 30-09-2016, From Tuesday to Sunday: 10-12h; 17-20h
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Alessandro Penso, one of the best contemporary Italian photographer, arrives in Palau for the photographic section of Festival Isole che Parlano.
Alessandro Penso won several awards, including PDN Photo Student Award, PDN Photo Annual Award, Px3, Project Launch Award in Santa Fe 2011, Terry O’ Neill TAG Award 2012, Sofa Global Award 2013, 1st General News of World press Photo, Magnum Foundation Emergency Found, Burn Emerging Photographer Found, Photo Story of the Year Time Magazine and his works appeared in numerous publications.
His exhibition, “LESBOS”, faces the big problem of immigration of refugees to Europe. According to UNHCR, approximately 850,000 refugees and migrants, including children, arrived in Greece by sea in 2015. Of these, just over 500,000 landed on Lesbos, a Greek island around eight nautical miles from the Turkish coast. Although at the centre of migration flows, Lesbos had barely nothing to offer to Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who arrived there. Once they reached Europe’s beaches, they were welcomed with a long trek across the island’s mountainous interior, followed by days and nights spent in crowded refugee camps, where not even a place in a tent was guaranteed and where basic facilities such as toilets and showers were lacking. But it was in those under-serviced and poorly managed camps that they had to stay, in order to obtain the required registration to allow them to travel legally through Greece and continue their journey of hope towards other European countries, such as Germany and Sweden.
The exhibition “Lesbos”, which consists of almost 40 pictures, will be inaugurated on Thursday, September 8th at 9.30 pm, at the Centro di Documentazione of Palau. To follow, Alessandro Penso will be the protagonist of the meeting ‘Reflections on the ethics of a craft’, and he will tell the audience of his experience.
The exhibition, realised in collaboration with Ogros Association, will be open until September 30th.
Submitted by Mauro Barbato
