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YAP Festival 2026
YOUNG ARTISTS PHOTO FESTIVAL
Oct. 23 | Nov. 30 - Montebelluna
YAP, an event designed for artists aged 18 to 29. This festival offers the opportunity to express their worldview, promoting artistic and professional growth.
I, imperfect light
Daniele, Marco & Andrea
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The first edition of the YAP Festival, the new festival dedicated to contemporary photography and emerging young artists, has concluded. The initiative offered a space for visibility and discussion, bringing together photographers, curators, and the public around a cultural program attentive to the languages ​​of the image and contemporary themes. Exhibitions and meetings showcased a diverse and ever-evolving field of photography, confirming the festival's commitment to promoting the research of new generations. With a positive response from the public and industry professionals, the YAP Festival is laying the foundation for a project destined to grow over time.
Sebastiano
YAPoff: Photography as a Bridge Between Memory and Emotion
With YAPoff, the YAP Festival's parallel project, photography moves beyond the exhibition space and into the places of everyday life. The festival brought its workshops to a retirement home and a social cooperative, creating a deeply valuable educational and human experience. In the retirement home, residents were accompanied on a journey through lifelong memories: through images, photography became a tool for memory, storytelling, and sharing. In the social cooperative, the young people worked on emotions, learning to recognize and convey feelings and moods through the photographic gaze. YAPoff has thus established itself as an inclusive project, capable of using photography as a universal language and a means of connection, confirming the social and cultural vocation of the YAP Festival.
I, imperfect light
YAP Festival — Call for Artists
Photography is born as an act of exposure: to light, to time, to the gaze of others. But every light carries with it a shadow, every image a margin of opacity. I, Imperfect Light is an invitation to interrogate identity as a fragile and changing space, far from any ideal of transparency or completeness. Continuing with the theme "Loving Yourself, Beyond the Shadows," the YAP Festival offers a reflection that shifts from love as a relationship to the self as a process: a self that constructs, exposes, and transforms itself through images. A self that seeks not to correct or perfect itself, but to recognize itself in its own imperfection. Photography—today more than ever immersed in digital flows, algorithms, and infinite archives—becomes a privileged tool for exploring this condition. Not just a self-portrait, but a practice of awareness; not just a representation, but a political act of visibility. The “I” that emerges is neither stable nor definitive: it is fragmented, vulnerable, sometimes contradictory, often in dialogue with the body, memory, gender, the environment, and the technologies that traverse it. I, Imperfect Light invites young artists to explore the threshold between what is exposed and what remains in shadow, between the desire to be seen and the need for protection. The selected works will explore the theme through photography and contemporary visual languages—from video to installation, from archives to hybrid practices—examining the relationship between identity, image, and the present. In a historical moment in which the exposure of the self is often demanded, accelerated, and normalized, the YAP Festival proposes to slow down our gaze. To restore the image to its complexity, and identity to its right not to be fully legible. Because it is precisely in the imperfection of light that the self finds its most authentic form.
- The rules for the Io, luce imperfetta competition, promoted as part of the YAP Festival, will be published soon.
YAP Festival | 23 Ott. - 30 Nov. 2026 | Montebelluna
I, imperfect light
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