Bergamo Festival – Coraggiosi si diventa

Earlier this year I was invited to show my ‘Cholitas Escaladoras’ project at Fotografica Bergamo Festival, a photography festival held annually in the beautiful Bergamo Alta, the medieval hilltop city that sits above the modern sprawl below. Now in its fifth edition, the festival takes over two extraordinary venues, the Monastero del Carmine and the Ex Ateneo, and runs across four weekends through October and into November.

The theme this year was Coraggiosi si diventa, which roughly translates as “Courage is made, not born.” One that the story of the Cholitas fits into pretty naturally. The festival brought together work from photographers including Brent Stirton, Peter Caton, Silvia Alessi, and Forough Alaei, all exploring different dimensions of what courage actually looks like in the world right now. Not the abstract, heroic kind. The daily, grinding, quietly defiant kind.

Showing work in a context like this is a different experience to a commercial setting. The work is placed in conversation with other projects, other stories, other geographies. You’re no longer the sole author of the room. There’s something both humbling and clarifying about that. The Cholitas project, which at its core is about a group of indigenous Aymara women reclaiming their identity and their dignity through mountaineering, sat alongside stories from Uganda, Sudan, and beyond. The cumulative weight of those stories together does something that no individual project quite manages alone.

I also gave talks across two weekends in October, which gave me the chance to walk audiences through the project directly and have real conversations about it afterwards. That exchange, the questions that come from people encountering the work for the first time without any prior context, continues to be one of the most useful things you can do for a long-term project. It forces a clarity you don’t always have when you’re still inside it.

The work has since continued travelling as part of Fotografica On The Road, showing in Nembro earlier this spring. Which is, I think, the best possible outcome for a project like this.

 https://toddantony.com/portfolio/cholita-escaladoras/