Creative Shortlist

This photographic story was born out of a need to try to understand the most intimate, emotional and multifaceted meaning of migration: looking at my family, who emigrated to northern Italy after World War 2, and at myself, who left Genoa and arrived in Buenos Aires, a city that last century saw the arrival of millions of Italians in search of a better future.

Documenting this passage was useful to me, as it expanded the meaning of migration as something that not only concerns the person undertaking the journey, but extends to the whole community. Consequently, migration becomes an existential caesura that marks a before and an after. It is an event that questions the identity of the people involved, opening the way to change, but also to uncertainty; to the fear of being forgotten and the need to create new relationships.

Valentina was born in Genoa in 1982.
After 10 years working in commercial photography she felt the need to redefine her visual vocabulary and in 2019 she moved to Buenos Aires where she began a research focused on issues of gender, memory and identity.
Her long-term projects are inspired by poetry and literature, especially the magical realism that pervades Latin America, and approach psychoanalysis and explore social issues such as migration, family and patriarchy.