PhotoEspaña2009
PHotoEspaña 2009 will take place from 3 June to 26 July. The Festival of Photography and Visual Arts will offer at this twelfth edition a proposal comprising 74 exhibitions, 31 in the Official Section, 7 in other venues and 35 in the Off Festival, spread in a total of 60 exhibition spaces such as museums, art galleries, art centres and exhibition rooms. 259 artists and creators of 40 nationalities will participate at the Festival.
The Official Section of PHE09 will develop the concept of The everyday. The Festival will include exhibitions by artists belonging to different generations, geographic origins and artistic and conceptual tendencies. It will preferably focus on recent productions, but will also try to reveal historic times where connection between photography and the everyday has acquired special importance. The Official Section will be completed by Historical exhibitions and Grand Masters, and it will also open its doors to invited projects. Meanwhile the Off Festival will bring together the best exhibition projects by the main art galleries in Madrid.
This new edition of PHotoEspaña consolidates Madrid, Lisbon and Cuenca as host cities. In this edition, the Museu Colecção Berardo in Lisbon will participate in the Festival with two exhibitions; Cuenca, PHotoEspaña host city by its third consecutive year, will host OpenPHoto, an exhibition programme consisting of proposals coming from embassies and foreign institutions of 8 countries; and for the fist time this year, Alcala de Henares will join the Festival hosting photography workshops of Campus PHE. Fundación Canal will organized the contest El Agua de Madrid (Water of Madrid) and workshops for children and youths.
PHE09 will deepen into programmes with pedagogical and professional aims. A novelty in this edition will be Festival Campus PHE Edición de Libros, a programme devoted to publishing projects which will take place at the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, in Mostoles (Madrid), joining Campus PHE Grand Masters, photography workshops and master classes that will be held in Alcalá de Henares. Besides, Descubrimientos PHE expands its scope and organizes portfolio reviews in Lima and Mexico City. For the first time, PHotoEspaña and the Banco Santander Foundation will organize an educational programme for the youth, in which 198 students of 6 Madrid's high schools will participate. The programmes for general public, which are addressed to people of every age and education level with an interest in photography, will include guided tours of the Festival exhibitions, workshops for children and young people as well as family programmes to allow families to enjoy PHotoEspaña all together.
PHotoEspaña faces a new challenge in 2009: the international promotion of the Festival as per PHotoEspaña International. This ambitious project, which will not be carried out during June and July, the regular dates of PHotoEspaña, promotes the spread of exhibitions and professional programs of PHotoEspaña beyond Spanish boundaries. The exhibition programme of PHE09 will include two exhibition venues outside Spain: Portugal will host again some of the exhibitions of the Official Section of the Festival and, for the fist time, Italy will also be international venue. The Italian programme, created with the support of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Regional Government of Madrid as part of the Made in Mad programme, will be carried out in Milan starting in October. The internationalization of the Festival will be also applied to programmes with pedagogical and professional aims. PHotoEspaña will allow the viewing of portfolios Descubrimientos PHE Madrid, Lima and Mexico City with the support of the Cervantes Institute and the AECID (Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo, the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation).
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