From April 12 to 16, 2023, the OELLE Foundation, in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts of Catania, produced and organized "Memory of the Territory, Future of Images," a workshop led by Irene Alison and Alessandra Pasquarelli, with the participation of 12 students from the two-year photography program at the Academy of Fine Arts of Catania. From the provocations of pop art to the first experiments in appropriation art in the 1980s, to the recurring use of vernacular imagery in contemporary photography, photographers increasingly see themselves not so much as creators of images but as architects of that recontextualization process capable of imbuing pre-existing images with entirely new meaning.
Starting from research into the local iconographic heritage—which may focus on a specific place/event central to the area's identity (e.g., the feast of Sant'Agata)—the course analyzed the history and expressive possibilities of narration through archival images, guiding participants toward the construction of an individual project realized (entirely or partially) through "recycled" photographic materials, coordinating them in the creation of a collective photographic notebook that collects everyone's work.
