Photobook Mania 05 / Benedetta Casagrande presents All Things Laid Dormant

About the event

The fifth appointment of Photobook Mania will take place on Friday 11 October at PhMuseum Lab. Artist Benedetta Casagrande will present All Things Laid Dormant, winner of the Luigi Ghirri Prize 2024 and of the FE+SK Book Award, and published by Skinnerboox.

All Things Laid Dormant questions the ways in which we relate to other animals, the space they occupy in our personal and collective imagination, intraspecific coexistence, and the possibility of constructing new forms of kinship and intimacy in a context of mass extinction. Articulated through a series of encounters with the non-human world mediated by the implicit ambiguity of photography, that simultaneously facilitates and hinders contact, All Things Laid Dormant is both an ode and a lament, an act of love and an expression of mourning that embodies the suffering of loss and the desire to find a place and a sense of belonging within the fragile context of our time.

Some copies of the book will be available to be purchased and signed by the author.

Bio

Benedetta Casagrande is a photographer, writer and curator. Her artistic, curatorial and writing practice unfolds through slow research (term coined by Carolyn F. Strauss); slowness as a principle of observation, of attunement, of deceleration and constant repositioning, in an attempt to situate the human experience of the world within wider webs of relations, times and spaces. As a medium which is fundamentally based on encountering the world, she works with photography as a means of entering into a relationship with the surrounding environment and its animal, vegetal and objectual elements, through movements of proximity and distance, presence and absence, contact and loss of contact. Her work has been exhibited in national and international exhibitions, including PhMuseum Festival (Bologna, 2024), Fotografia Europea (Reggio Emilia, 2024), Photo Brussels Festival (2024), ADI Design Museum (Milano, 2023), 副本 INSTANCE (Shanghai, 2021) and Photo Ireland Festival (2019). She is the winner of Premio Luigi Ghirri 2024 and of FE+SK Book Award, thanks to which she published All things laid dormant (Skinnerboox, 2024). Benedetta is one of five founders of Ardesia Projects, a non-profit organization dedicated to visual culture, and runs the accessible education program Show & Tell alongside Elena Vaninetti. Since 2021 she is Head Archivist and Project Manager for the Daniele Tamagni Foundation. In her free time, she works as a volunteer in a wildlife rehabilitation center.

Admission to the exhibition is free. For more information, write to us at info@phmuseumlab.com.