Marco Gualazzini: Resilient

Resilient is the first book by Marco Gualazzini, a photographer who collaborates with the most important national and international magazines and whose work is represented by the Contrasto Agency. Resilient presents his reportages made in Africa from 2009 to 2018. The texts by Domenico Quirico and Gianluigi Colin enrich the volume.

Resilience is the ability of a system to adapt to change. Marco Gualazzini tries to convey precisely this ability of Africa, aiming his goal in search of stories to tell with images.

His research began by investigating the relationship between religion, witchcraft, and mental illness in eastern Congo, where only one psychiatric hospital existed when the service was set up and where those suffering from mental illness are still considered demons. He then reported on mining exploitation involving the Congo, the war in Mali, rape as a weapon of war (15,000 women are raped every year in the Congo), Islamist infiltrations in sub-Saharan Africa, and the refugee reception policies by very poor Uganda.

Gualazzini recounted the conditions of South Sudan and Somalia, probably one of the most inaccessible countries, where foreigners (and government officials) are targets of the Shabaab. The latest work from 2018 testifies to the serious humanitarian crisis along the Lake Chad basin due to desertification as a result of climate change.

As Gianluigi Colin underlines in his text that closes the volume, "there are stories of women raped in Congo, of Somali girls in a perpetual journey to escape from hunger, of girls in the refugee camps in Chad. But they are also stories about the cruel militiamen in the north of Mali, the members of Ganda Koy, or the 'Children of the earth' (they made thousands of deaths among the Tuaregs), with machine guns in their hands as they wear a shirt of a soccer team as a symbol of paradoxical respectability. Or, here are the stories of the desperate journey of the people of the Nuba Mountains, in an attempt to escape the bombings and massacres of the Sudanese government."

Page after page, the images cover and testify to "almost an entire turn of the Continent", accompanied by long captions that are real parallel stories, providing immediate contextualization of the situations and events immortalised by Marco Gualazzini's camera.