Curatorial Maps is a collaborative platform that brings together women/women identifying photographers and curators with the objective of recreating a map of contemporary photography made by women.

Curatorial Maps wants to promote the work of both artists and curators, by fostering collaborations and offering a new point of view on the curatorial work and challenges related to this role.

When we feel lost in the space we turn to maps, almost looking for a divine sign in them. However, the geographical maps we have seen and studied in school represent a subjective vision of the world. We saw the world the way it appears in the hemisphere we belong.
For Europeans the center of the universe was Europe, as for Americans was the United States, and so on.
We can notice this even more when we analyze Mercatore and Peters’ different map projections. But a map represents a story, a hierarchy, a collision between closeness and distance, foreign and familiar, and it brings with it omessages and significants that determine how much our own vision of the world compares with the world itself.

The first Chapter Without Geography You Are Nowhere\Everywhere focuses on the theme of geography.
Irene Tondelli, project founder and curator and Davida Carta, founder and curator of Under- Exposed Magazine introduce a selection of photographers that contribuite to this theme in various and unique ways.

Artists involved

Michela Benaglia, Persia Campbell, Emanuela Colombo, Mariana Guardani, Lucy Hayto, Yazmeen P. Loaiza, Giulia Parlato, Francesca Pozzi, Anita Scianò, Tiffany Sutton.

The term Geography stretches into the intimate, physical, political, identity, literary, imaginary. Aspects that mix together as to form mountains, lakes, rivers, and most of all a new experience of the world, where the viewer can create his own path and vision, freely and responsibly. What Geography is important to you, in order to redefine a new map of the world? The Home Page image is a college by artist Maddalena Notardonato. [Website: https://www.curatorialmaps.com/]

Michela Benaglia & Emanuela Colombo

Michela Benaglia: After graduating in Industrial Design, she has worked for 10 years as an art director. During this period, photographing social issues became more and more prominent in her life. She pursued two Reportage Masters and her initial passion become part of her job. In fact, she is now a freelance photographer working on editorial and commercial projects, mainly on social issues.

Emanuela Colombo: After graduating in Communication Sciences, and after working for 10 years as a sales representative, in 2007 she decided to follow her passion, photography. She graduated at the Naba Institute in Milan, Italy, where she earned a Master in Photography and Visual Design, and she started working with several NGOs. After the birth of her son Lorenzo, she started to make portraits of animals in her studio.

Persia Campbell

Persia Campbell graduated in Visual Arts with a specialization in Digital Media (Photography and Video) from the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez. She trained in Art Direction at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC) of the UNAM and got a Master in 2018 in the “Studies and Creative Processes in Art and Design” program of the UACJ. Her photographic work explores female self-representation through color management and production design. She works on stage design to reconstruct and represent the intimate border and northern Mexican aesthetic. Her work is shown in national and international exhibitions.

Mariana Guardani

Mariana Guardani born in 1980 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, graduated in Architecture and got a Master in Photography in 2011 with the dissertation “Foreing Photographers in the city: the field work and image of São Paulo, 1930-60”. Her photography practice has appeared experimentally since 2015 during a road trip and has become increasingly an important investigative practice and deepening the theme of drift, human existence, time, passage and feminist issues. Her work is shown in international exhibitions.

Lucy Hayto

Lucy Hayto is a documentary photographer with an MA in Photography living in Manchester, UK.
She is currently working as a photography lecturer and technician.  Her work aims to inform of current issues regarding the Anthropocene, social and environmental landscape.

Yazmeen P. Loaiza

Originally from Ecuador, she earned a BA in Liberal Arts (Major in Film and Minor in Literature) at King’s College London. Her photographic work focuses on the ontological aspect and physical intervention on the image. An introspection on feminine and latina identity is raised through, mainly, analogue exercises. The use of the body for the creation of every piece is essential as a tool for occupying spaces and consciousness. She is also exploring the photographic image as performative, drifting away from the image as record or archive.

Giulia Parlato

Giulia Parlato (b.1993) is an Italian visual artist based between London, UK and Palermo, Italy. She graduated with a BA (Hons) in Photography from the London College of Communication in 2016, and with a MA in Photography from the Royal College of Arts in 2019. Her practice delves into histories, myths and cultural heritage, involving photography and video. She analyses the historical use of photography as a document of truth. Giulia’s work is shown nationally and internationally in both group and solo exhibitions.

Francesca Pozzi

Francesca Pozzi is an Italian freelance photographer from Milan, Italy. She graduated in 2015 from the Italian Institute of Photography. She works mainly as an interior design photographer. Her personal research is connected to the landscape; she processes the images as belonging to multiple realities, bringing the viewer in a new dimension, free from canonical aspects, allowing a broader vision of the universe that surrounds us.

Anita Scianò

Anita Scianò (b. 1989) is and italian photographer and filmmaker from Prato (Italy), she now lives in Bologna, Italy.
She graduated in Scenography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and specialized in Photography at the L.a.b.a in Florence, she attended a Master of High Education in Documentary Filmaking from the Cineteca in Bologna. Her research follows a dreamlike and intimist route. She is immersed in a constant study and remembrance of the past, both personal and social. She is attracted by private moments, delicate, everyday moments to be told. She prefers analogue media, 35 mm for photographs and dv, mini dv cameras for video.

Tiffany Sutton

Born in 1981 in Rochester, NY, and raised in suburban St. Louis, MO. She began documenting family and friends after receiving a Kodak camera as a Christmas gift in the early 1990s. While primarily a self-taught photographer, she also attended classes at Washington University in St. Louis and St. Louis Community College. Sutton has decided to work with black women exclusively, as a way to reconnect with herself and discuss social movements. Sutton works with digital, film and instant cameras.  Sutton is a 2020 Harvard #InTheCity Visual Artist Fellow and was awarded the Regional Arts Commission St. Louis Artist Support Grant in 2019.