© Davide Degano
27-29 nov 2025
Opening hours: 7:30pm - 10:30pm during the show
Contact: janknops@atelierarthurrogiers.be / 0032494417070
Address: Keizer Karelstraat 103 - 1000 Brussels
Metro: 1 en 5 (Schuman)
Bus: 28 - 61 (Ardense Jagers) 64 (Luther)
60 - 63 (Ambiorix)
Do-li-na
Do-li-na explores the relationship between images, memory, and identity in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, a borderland where Italian, Slovenian, Friulian, and German cultures meet. The project began with the rediscovery of my grandmother’s concealed Slovenian heritage and the traces of fascist Italianization policies that sought to erase minority identities. What first appeared as a private silence revealed itself as part of a broader collective repression.
Combining large-format photography, archival materials, and nocturnal video recordings, the work investigates how history is remembered or forgotten and how images mediate these processes. In the valleys where Italy, Austria, and Slovenia converge, the landscape becomes a symbolic geography of the margin — a space where myth, memory, and oral tradition endure.
Working with the Guardia Forestale, I placed nocturnal cameras in remote mountain areas at 2,200 meters, recording animal movements that elude human interpretation. These presences resist narrative, offering a vision of existence beyond our grasp.
Do-li-na reflects on photography as an act of construction as much as omission, questioning its claim to truth and its ethical role in shaping collective imagination.
Davide Degano (b. 1990) is a visual artist whose work explores how images shape memory, identity, and collective imagination. Rejecting photography as neutral documentation, he treats it as a site of tension between reality and fiction, visibility and erasure, questioning what is remembered and what is silenced. His projects challenge conventional documentary practice through a multidisciplinary approach that combines classical image-making with experimental strategies, opening space for counter-narratives.
He holds a BA in Visual Arts from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague, where he received an honourable mention for the Paul Schuitema Award, and a Master’s in Photography from KASK – Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent, where his graduation work was awarded the Fonds Roger De Conynck Prize. Born in Sicily and raised in Friuli, with Italian and Colombian nationality and a Slovenian family background, he has developed a sustained interest in borderlands, both geographical and symbolic, as spaces where dominant narratives fracture and alternative imaginaries emerge.