Glimpses of Africa | Africa from two perspectives
Immersed in the western culture we live with wool over our eyes that distorts the vision of what we see: our cultural colonization makes us involuntary and unconscious colonizers. During a trip to Africa a group of young Italian fellows took pictures with the compassion and sympathy of those who want to understand. These pictures were only a small part of the process. As partners of a project of ACAV (a non-profit organization in Trento), few months later we sent 50 disposable cameras to 12 schools in Uganda, and asked some local youngsters to take pictures of the same environment and the same situations. We then received more than 1,500 photographs from Koboko, focused on the same context the young Italians saw, but with a different, original and more participated point of view. The same reality by two prospects, two visions: on the one side a culturally constructed fictitious interpretation, and on the other one less defined, confused, more alive, yet contradictory, imposed, revealed.
Glimpses of Africa | Africa from two perspectives is an attempt to understand and explain how different outlooks can highlight a cultural predominance, although unintentional. There is a portion of cultural insolence that has become an integral part of our society in the way we live and relate, as we don’t question ourselves anymore, we take everything for granted: our judgement is before anything, above everything. It is a way of looking that reveals an inability of seeing, a contact that underlines the distance. The lack of attention and elaboration amplifies our misconceptions, our prejudices, our appeasing attitude and our politically correctness, our trivialization habits. It’s undoubtedly hard to observe and see with the eyes of others as well as our own, but the lines of new horizons can only be glanced with new cognitions, with new awareness._nome collettivo. A cura di Piero Cavagna, Giulio Malfer