Sofia Uslenghi
Born in Reggio Calabria in 1985, she began to photograph at the age of twenty, later discovering that photography as a means to investigate and put in order her personal story.
Her focus is mainly on self-portrait, working on the overlays and layers of photographs that hold together pieces of her story and that of her family, places of origin and people who were part of it. She uses maps, scraps of satellite photographs, Google Street View screenshots, all tools to virtually return to her birthplace and where she feels something of hers has been left behind.
In 2015 she exhibited a selection of self-portraits at the Gusmeri Fine Art gallery in Brescia. In 2017 she was selected by Giuseppe Violetta, artistic director of Heillandi Gallery to be one of the artists represented by the Lugano gallery, with whom she participates in Wopart Fair and the Mia Photo Fair of 2018 and 2019. In 2020, Gallery Valeria Bella has inaugurated her first solo exhibition at its venue in Milan. In 2021 and 2022 she exhibited at Paris Photo. In 2023 a documentary dedicated to her work was launched as part of the "Le Fotografe" series produced by Sky Arte under the direction of Francesco Raganato. In 2024 she was among the artists exhibited at ArteFiera in Bologna.
My Grandma and I
(Mia nonna ed io), 2016 - 2022
I started the project My Grandma and I in 2016, after others having explored with "Homesick" my relationship with the territory of my origins.
I was born in Reggio Calabria, then with my family we moved first to Messina, then again to Brescia, then to the Garda’s lake, then to Parma, nowadays I live in Milan. Wandering about is now part of my life. In the years when I started photographing myself and superimposing my image on that of the places of my childhood I was realizing the lack of roots. After finding a box of old photographs of my family, and in particular of my grandmother Isabella, I realized that I was missing a piece. And that's the reason why when I come back to Gerace I feel at home even though I've never lived there. I use the verb “to return” and not “to go” automatically because I felt that my roots are there. And that to me is a reassuring certainty.
The knowledge that there’s a place in the world where there are some threads that can rebuild a story. A community recognizing you as a member to some extent. And in this place, where her brothers and other relatives lived, the relationship with my grandmother Isabella rises up. However, I didn't have a particularly close bond with my grandmother Isabella when she was alive. It was a very ordinary grandmother/granddaughter relationship. Then she got cancer same year we moved to Brescia. I was 12. It was an exhausting time, we moved hastily and my mother, her only daughter, was forced to shuttle between Reggio and Brescia to assist her. After less than a year, my grandmother passed away at the age of 68. During the following years we found a way out and after so many years I have realized that it had been a rip hard to digest, that at that moment it was a practical issue and that we were trying to find a balance and rebuild, but that deep down we were all struggling. I then started to dream about my grandmother, with the awareness that she was dead, and this amplified our relationship. Maybe a consequence of some suggestions but it gave me the feeling of having finally a beautiful relationship with my roots.
Sofia Uslenghi