Down the Hills, Up the Mountains

Essay 379 • Mar 24th 2019

Faedis is a small municipality in the region of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, in the north of Italy. It is a small town where my father was born and raised and where I grew up. The municipality represents, in my opinion, the region to its fullest. Geographically the territory extends from plain, to the hills up the mountains and the main activity is agriculture. What strikes me about this small town is the subtle balance between the generous strength of nature, man and 2000 years of agricultural tradition. Everything seems suspended in subsistence practices of the 50s, but this has not prevented the technological progress to allow businesses to export their products worldwide.
However, over the last 50 years, practicing farmers have dropped from 40 to 2 percent. In a place that, since its origins, has seen the work in the fields as more of a “moral” practice than a “job”, the data is rather worrying.
In my project I want to explore the “ resistance factor” and the relation that this last generation has with the territory and their struggle to maintain their traditions alive.














 

Davide Degano
I was born in Cividale del Friuli, Italy, the 4th of June 1990. After I graduated from high-school, I moved alone to Australia, where I lived for 3 years while traveling around Asia. During my traveling I had developed a strong interest toward photography and soon enough I really fell in love with the medium.
My interest and passion toward photography is due to my fascination by the narrative possibilities that the medium offers.

I believe that visual narratives have a strong power that many times is impossible to convey in a written text. For this reason I focused more and more on the medium of photography during my studies and started to investigate on the storytelling possibilities offered by the visual medium itself. This eventually led me to the Royal Academy of Art, KABK, where I have got the opportunity to learn and experiment a huge variety of approaches to Photojournalism.

I had the opportunity to exhibit last year in London at the Brick Lane Gallery some of my street portraits. Also I exhibit in 2014 in Cividale, Italy, at the “ Casa delle Arti”. The exhibition was curated by Professor Raffaelli, from Formae Mentis.
I was recently included in an exhibition in London (14th of October 2018 ), along with other 38 well-known photographers. The exhibition title is “We Feed The World “ and it was curated by Cheryl Newman and funded by Gaia Foundation.

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