From representations to self-representations. Young people with a migrant background in the Sguardi Plurali photography exhibition

Although Italy today is in fact a pluralistic country of multiple cultural views, its political and cultural institutions tend to represent a uniform national identity, reproducing a fixed consensus of what being Italian means. Processes of “othering” reproduce a reified concept of being Italian that excludes both young recent migrants and the children of immigrants. Structural processes of demarcation, exclusion and marginalisation are at play. This article is based on the photographic essays produced in 2021 and 2024 as part of the Sguardi Plurali (“Plural Glimpses”) project, a national competition and exhibition for photographers younger than age 35 who emigrated to Italy at a young age or were born in Italy to immigrant parents. After first analysing the rich visual materials and their accompanying text, I reflect on the contestants’ widely differing life stories, on the complex connections between migration experiences and the photographic records of it, and on the relationship between generalised representation and self-representation. I explore not only the final submissions, but the creative process itself, reconstructed through the voices of the photographers, as well as how the project came about.