Abstract

Hillside and mountain villages, green fields and endless plains with scattered settlements, post-industrial medium-sized towns constitute Europe as much as the big cities we all know. These places have long been considered peripheral in opposition to the large urban centres and have often been associated with a certain passivity, stagnation and resistance to change. Yet, within their interstices, inlets and plains, a closer look into these places shows that they also move, live and transform. And, they are also continuously enriched with new voices and new stories. This exhibition intends to start precisely from these stories to tell the everyday life of Europe's shrinking areas, where the narratives of old and new inhabitants, but also of returnees, come together. In this way, the stories of those who leave, those who arrive and those who return intertwine in a new rhythm of life that over time transforms and is transformed by the space in which these new communities settle. Through an itinerant research, travelling photography workshops were carried out in Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Germany in spring and summer 2022, following the traces of these changes outside the spaces of urbanity. We have listened to the voices of those who live in the so-called peripheries of Europe, starting from a simple question: what makes the place where you live welcoming and how would you capture this in an image? The exhibition shows the stories, the photographs and the emotional maps created directly by those who live the everyday life in these communities - The result is the co-construction of a different, new imaginary, anchored in the time and space of lesser-known Europe. The images that follow are full of hopes for the future, desire for change, complex encounters, collective utopias. We invite you to immerse yourself in this itinerant exploration, to get to know through their eyes the life in a lesser-known but fascinating Europe, the Europe of outskirts.