Gold Medal in the category « Alternative / Experimental »

Sonia is a visual artist and analog photographer currently based in Southern Italy, on the Mediterranean coast. She lived for several years between Rome and Berlin, where she worked primarily as a special effects makeup artist for film and television. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Film Studies and a master’s degree with a thesis focused on the philosophy of photography.

Her photographic practice is rooted in a deeply material approach to image-making. Rather than opposing digital photography, her choice of analog processes responds to a need for physical contact with the photographic surface and its transformations. Process takes precedence over outcome: waiting, error, unpredictability, and loss of control are integral elements of her work.

Her practice unfolds through analog shooting, in-camera double exposures, self-development, and darkroom printing, forming a closed circuit in which the entire process passes through her hands while remaining partially open to chance. She works with experimental and alternative techniques such as ecological developers like caffenol, film manipulation, darkroom interventions, and Polaroid processes—including emulsion lifts and image deterioration—as well as historical techniques such as mordançage and chemigrams, where chemistry, time, and matter actively participate in the formation of the image.

Her work revolves around intimacy, fragility, female identity, and the instability of memory. She often employs self-portraiture not as self-representation, but as a means to investigate the body as a shell: a fragile surface where presence and disappearance coexist. Memory, in her work, is uneven and unreliable—some details persist while others dissolve.

When the photographic support itself is altered or degraded, the image ceases to function as a stable container of memory and begins to question its own role as evidence. This tension reflects a broader condition of contemporary culture, in which images circulate endlessly while losing weight and substance. For Sonia, photography is not a fixed image but an ongoing process. Once an intervention begins, the image continues to change over time, remaining open, unstable, and unresolved—like bodies and memories themselves.