From Friday to Sunday, the BìFoto Fest – International Photography Festival in Sardinia – returns, now in its sixteenth edition. For three days, Mogoro and Curcuris will host the inaugural events of a new exhibition itinerary, featuring eight photographic projects that will remain on display for at least twelve months , accompanied by guided tours, meetings with the authors, portfolio reviews, awards ceremonies, and music.
Each edition of BìFoto takes inspiration from a song or album chosen by the artistic direction. The common thread for 2026 will be "Dio è morto," written by Francesco Guccini in 1965 and recorded in 1967 by the Nomadi: a song that explores disenchantment and the loss of certainties, while also leaving open the possibility of rebirth.
The eight projects in the new edition develop around this inspiration, with different perspectives on the present.
Four photographers are among the protagonists of the 16th edition. Pietro Masturzo , a documentary photographer and independent photojournalist, presents Water Apartheid in Palestine , a work created during several trips to Palestine, especially the Jordan Valley, which documents the issue of Palestinian communities' access to water and the effects of the occupation on daily life and the surrounding landscape.
Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Shbair , born and raised in Gaza and now a staff writer for the Associated Press, exhibits Gaza: Life Rewritten by War . Through images taken from within the war, Shbair recounts how the conflict has transformed the most mundane aspects of life, encompassing displacement, loss, separation, and the search for safety. Over the course of her work, the distance between the photographer and the people she photographed has gradually disappeared as she herself has become displaced.
Giampaolo Catogno presents Ecce Homo , a black-and-white project dedicated to the rites of Holy Week in the Mediterranean. This research, begun in the 1990s in Sardinia and later extended to other Mediterranean islands, uses photography as a tool for observing rituals, faith, and popular traditions.
With Tania: The Trans Woman Who Defied Francoism , Luca Gaetano Pira brings to BìFoto a photographic and documentary exploration of the life of Tania Navarro, one of the last trans women to survive the Spanish dictatorship. The project interweaves archives, testimony, and portraits to reconstruct a story marked by institutional repression, but also by solidarity networks and participation in the first Spanish Pride parade.
These works are joined by the winning projects of the international competition organized every two years to select three works to be included in the festival's exhibition.
The selected projects are Drifting Shadows: Space Debris by Fiorella Baldisserri (Italy), dedicated to the growing problem of space debris, Arasaig (Safe Place) by Alfio Tommasini (Switzerland) , a research carried out in the Highlands and Northern Islands of Scotland around the meaning of “safe place”, We Still Have the Soul by Luis Casadevall (Spain), developed over twelve years in Havana.
The jury also awarded a Special Mention to South Korean photographer Seunggu Kim for Better Days , a project that observes collective forms of free time in contemporary South Korean society.
(Unioneonline/AD)