Nicola Lo Calzo is an Italian photographer and phd-researcher based in France since 2006.
Hiw works focuses on the notions of border and margin, showing the strategies of survival and reinvention of selves produced by subaltern communities in a postcolonial context. His research is part of a personal questioning around identity and the body politic, which draws on his experience as a queer person. Its projects are the fruit of long-term work in close collaboration with communities and local actors (artists, researchers, activists), a time necessary to restore the complexity of political and symbolic issues, as well as subjectivities and personal trajectories. For ten years, Lo Calzo has been engaged in a long-term photographic research project on the memories of resistance in post-colonial time: the KAM project. Started in 2010, KAM is developed in a “rhizomic” fashion and covers different territories of West Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas, taking the form of an evolving and organic project. The memory of resistance to slavery is thought of here not as a “subject” but as a reading grid, both to deconstruct the dominant representations around this memory, but also to show subaltern memory practices which live on both sides of the Atlantic in historically marginalized communities. Lo Calzo is member of the editorial committee of the digital arts research platform PLARA and co-curator of the International Biennial of Photographic Encounters of Guyana. He is the recipient of a Cnap grant (2018) and nominated for the Prix Elysée (2019) and the Niépce prize (2020).