NAPLES.- The Paul Thorel Prize, designed to reactivate the workspaces and tools of artist Paul Thorel (1956-2020), is one of many initiatives designed by the Foundation by the same name to remember his pioneering work in the field of photography and the digital image, in line with the generous spirit of his life. The prize, which will be awarded annually, consists of a one-month residence in Paul Thorel’s Neapolitan studio for the production of an unprecedented artistic project, financed by the Foundation. At the end of the residences of the three winning artists, the Foundation will run an exhibition of the projects in 2024 in collaboration with the Intesa Sanpaolo’s Gallerie of d’Italia, partners in the Prize, and will produce documentation in the form of a catalogue.

The winners of the first edition of the Prize are Clusterduck (a collective of five Italian-German artists born in the 80s, who live between Florence, Milan and Berlin), Jim C Nedd (Verona, 1991; lives and works in Milan) and Lina Pallotta (San Salvatore Telesino, 1955; lives and works in Rome). Their proposals were selected from among the 12 applications submitted by a selection panel composed of Caterina Avataneo (independent curator), Lorenzo Gigotti (NERO co-founder), Elisa Medde (editor-in-chief of FOAM Magazine) and Valentina Tanni (curator and professor). The jury that chose the three winners consisted of the members of the selection panel, supported by Luigi Fassi (Director of Artissima), Antonio Carloni (Deputy Director of the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin) and Sara Dolfi Agostini (curator of the Fondazione Paul Thorel). The jury was also chaired by Guido Costa (President of the Fondazione Paul Thorel). The first residency of Clusterduck will start on the 20th March 2023.

“The creative approach to the production of images of the three winning artists is very different, varied and expresses the potential of an institution that seeks to carry out research on the photographic media today, following the footsteps of Paul Thorel.

From the reflection on new technologies, methods of collective appropriation and authorship in Clusterduck, we turn to depicting the body in its performance – individual and social – in the shots of Jim C Nedd, culminating in the photographic testimony of Lina Pallotta’s poetic and militant alliance with the Neapolitan transsexual community.

In their work, the city of Naples will emerge as a tool for survey, vision and stage, and Paul Thorel’s study will be reactivated and used to its full potential.” --Guido Costa, President of the Fondazione Paul Thorel.




The winning artists

Clusterduck is the collective that curated the #MEMEPROPAGANDA online exhibition hosted by Greencube Gallery, presented at The Influencers Festival (Barcelona), Tentacular Festival (Madrid), IFFR (Rotterdam), Urgent Publishing (Amsterdam, Arnheim), Radical Networks (Berlin), amongst many other festivals. It is currently developing Meme Manifesto, a physical collection of printed memes and a web-based collective project that aims to show how deep the web can go.

According to the Selection Committee: ‘Clusterduck is an interdisciplinary artistic collective working at the crossroads between research, design and transmedia, with an attention towards subcultures, aesthetic movements and the political implications generated by the network. Clusterduck’s research and artistic production underpins the full redefinition of the status of the image, its symbolic value and its new narrative potential, and how it is generated, presented, distributed, enjoyed, acquired and valued in the light of the mass adoption of network technologies.”

Jim C. Nedd is the founder of the Primitive Art experimental group together with Matteo Pit. Nedd is a photographer and director in advertising and editorial projects, and is part of the Toilet Paper Collective. His work was exposed to the Cinemateca Distrital, Bogota; Autoitalia, London; Damien & The Love Guru, CFA, Milan; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Liverpool Bienniale; Sandy Brown, Berlin. His work was published in Aperture, Vogue Italia, Kaleidoscope and RivistaStudio. Since 2019, he has been a UNICEF collaborator and has collaborated in reporting in Sicily, Beirut and the border with Syria.

According to the Selection Committee: ‘Jim C. Nedd makes digital photography, together with music, his main expressive language in both the arts and the commercial sphere. His photos are able to build bridges between different scales, connecting distant geographies, ecstatic festivecrowds and personal life episodes, as well as documentary and imagined reality. Popular culture and oral stories, handed down but not attested, often become the filter through which to put forward a critical look at society, and in particular on the representation of the body.”

Lina Pallotta is a photographer and lecturer. Trained at the International Center of Photography in New York (ICP), she published for various national and international journals, worked for the Impact Visuals Agency in New York and the Grazia Neri Agency in Milan. she had numerous personal and collective exhibitions in Europe and America, including the Queens Museum of Art in New York and L’Atelier de Visu in Marseille. She received the Catalogue Project 1998 award from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

According to the Selection Committee: ‘Lina Pallotta is an author who uses photography to tell and give visibility to stories and lives of marginalised individuals who are discriminated against and excluded from society and from the general media story. Her main focus has been transsexuals/transgender, working women, poets and underground artists through the photographic medium as both a detective and emancipatory tool. Trained at the International Center of Photography in New York (ICP) in photojournalism and documentary photography in the late 80s, her work depicts subjects intimately and poetically. Without rhetoric, we could say that her vision is ‘involved’ and ‘militant’.”