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S2/E5
“In the artistic process the studio comes after the photographic mission”
W/ Nicola Lo Calzo









              
            Square Meters features Nicola Lo Calzo, a photographer, queer artist and Ph.D. researcher from Italy. 

Nicola Lo Calzo lives and works in Paris where he teaches photography at École nationale supérieure d’arts Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC). Trained as a heritage curator at the Polytechnic University of Turin, he shifted to photography in 2008. His photographic practice and research are attentive to questions surrounding heritage, coloniality, and identity.

Nicola Lo Calzo’s photographs show how subalterns groups interact with their environment, how they develop strategies of survival and resistance.
For nine years, he has been engaged in a long-term photographic research project on the memories of the slave trade and slavery, their resistances and abolitions. This ongoing ambitious project, entitled Cham, has been elaborated into different series in Africa, the Caribbean and America. His photographs have been widely exhibited in museums, art centers and festivals

Talking about their workplace Nicola Lo Calzo says “In the artistic process the studio comes after the photographic mission”.


From 2015 to 2019 Lo Calzo led the Kazal project, a photographic masterclass with kolektif D2 photographers, on memory and crime under the dictatorship of Duvalier, the first project of its kind in Haiti. The project, produced by the Fokal Foundation, was published by Andrè Frére.

Kehrer and André Frère has published three of Nicola Lo Calzo’s books: Regla (2017), Obia (2015) and Inside Niger (2012). He is also a regular contributor to the international press including Le Monde (the newspaper and magazine), The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Internazionale and is occasionally commissioned by institutional or commercial enterprises.

Nicola A. Lo Calzo was recipient of the Cnap grant in 2018, nominated for the Prix Elysee in 2019 and nominated for the Prix Nièpce in 2020.
From 2014 to 2018, he was member of L'Agence à Paris.



Credits /
Recorded, edited and produced by The Room Projects
Curated and coordinate by Alessandra Chiericato
Associate Curator: Camilla Magnani
Recorded: January 2021
Music: Roberto Farina
Photo Credits: The Room Projects