Let’s give voice to elephants by taking my on-going photography conservation project to the 2017 Venice Biennale of Art!
Project
I am an Italian photographer (www.fassiophoto.com) based in Nairobi, Kenya, currently working on a personal long-term photography project on elephant conservation in collaboration with Big Life Foundation (www.biglife.org).
I have been invited by GAAF (www.globalartaffairs.org) to exhibit at the 2017 Venice Biennale, the world’s most prestigious and respected biennale of international contemporary art. With your help, I will take an extract of my strongest work to Venice.
Funds will cover the six months exhibition costs, printing, framing and shipment of works. All running costs that have to do with the realization of my long-term project (4wd rentals and all logistics involved) are both self managed and funded.
Let’s give voice to conservation and take elephants to the Biennale!
Big Life Foundation, Kenya
Big Life Foundation (www.biglife.org) was founded in September 2010 and has now expanded to employ 350 rangers, with 40 outposts protecting over 2 million acres of wilderness in the Amboseli-Tsavo-Kilimanjaro ecosystem of East Africa. Big Life was the first organization in East Africa with co-ordinated cross-border anti-poaching operations.
Recognizing that sustainable conservation can only be achieved through a community-based collaborative approach, Big Life uses innovative conservation strategies to address the greatest threats, reduce the loss of wildlife to poaching, defeat the ivory trade and mitigate human-wildlife conflict.
Big Life’s teams, operating on both sides of the Kenya/Tanzania border, now co-ordinate the pursuit and arrest of poachers as they attempt to escape across the border, something that prior to Big Life’s inception they were able to do with impunity. This new level of co-ordinated protection for the ecosystem has brought about a dramatic reduction in poaching of all animals in the region.
Venice Biennale, Italy
GAAF, Global Art Affairs Foundation (www.globalartaffairs.org) was founded in 2002 in New York. Since 2009, the Foundation is based in Leiden, the Netherlands with a branch in Venice, Italy. Since 2002 it has organized 28 contemporary art exhibitions and 8 symposia in Japan, USA, Europe and since 2011 is part of the Venice Biennale of architecture and art.
The Foundation has invited me to present my work in the exhibition Personal Structures / Time-Space-Existence that will take place at Palazzo Bembo and Palazzo Mora in Venice from May 13th to November 26th, 2017. A period of over six months.
This exhibition is part of the official program of the 57th Venice Biennale and, in the past editions, has been attended by 150.000 monthly visitors, gallerists, collectors, museum directors, curators and by over 3.000 journalists at the openings.
The opportunity to give voice to elephant conservation in this context is unequaled but I need your support to walk my big friends to Venice.
Thank you!
Usefull links
The invitation to exhibit at the 2017 Venice Biennale is independent from my long-term on-going photography project on elephant conservation. This last is self funded and will continue to go ahead even if I were not to reach the needed funds to exhibit in Venice.
Of course, having such an important international stage is priceless and it would greatly benefit me as artist and certainly contribute in giving voice to elephant conservation challenges ..