The commission of the “Sardegna Reportage” competition, which met in Nuoro on 24 February, identified six projects among the one hundred and twenty presented to the MAN Museum by as many competitors, highlighting in particular the work of Manuela Meloni, “The land of memory”.
The other projects indicated by the commission are those of Alessandra Cecchetto with “Cleopatra Uras”, Elisabetta Loi and Sergio Melis with “The courage of a mother”, Stefania Muresu with “Luci a mare”, Giuseppe Onida with “Senza titolo” and Stefano Pia with “Quail Penne”.
Inspired by the story of Robert Capa, to whom the MAN will dedicate an important retrospective starting from March 7th, the “Sardinia Reportage” competition sought an updated vision of today’s Sardinia through the gaze of photographers. Consistent with what was requested, the works identified by the jury stand out for their ability to approach the chosen subject and for their courage in describing contemporary aspects of the island, outside of clichés and traditional clichés. Of the various works, the original motivations and intentions, the importance, from a social point of view, of the chosen theme and the communicative power of the images were evaluated, even before the formal elements.
The commission – composed of Gian Luigi Colin, artistic director of the Corriere della Sera and of the cultural insert La Lettura, Paolo Curreli, editor of the cultural pages of Nuova Sardegna and Max Solinas, journalist, photo editor and photojournalist of the Unione Sarda – has thus motivated the choice made:
“The large participation in the competition and the high quality of many of the projects presented convinced us to select six works, different from each other in their approach to photography, formal sensitivity, chosen themes and language. Among all, we would like to point out Manuela Meloni’s project, dedicated to the fate of the lands of Quirra, an area of central-eastern Sardinia, home to a military easement known as PISQ, now abandoned. The ten photographs presented, part of a broader research carried out during 2013, describe with formal rigor and sensitivity of gaze the strange union between military architecture and agricultural landscape, describing the “immutable and suspended” atmosphere of the life of the local communities . The importance of the chosen theme, specific and universal at the same time, the quality of the shots, the charm of the color ranges, the coherence of the points of view, make this project extremely interesting and worthy of attention”.
Manuela Meloni’s project, together with a selection of shots of the other projects selected by the commission, will be exhibited at the MAN Museum starting next March 7, in conjunction with the exhibition dedicated to Robert Capa.