This week, RAWGUE.’s Editors visited the FotoSlovo Awards 2025 Grand Opening, and here are our impressions.
Quiet greeted us as soon as we crossed the threshold of Limassol’s Apothikes Papadaki Art Centre, where works from 60 photographers from all over the world awaited. The exhibition was carefully curated by visual artist and Foto Slovo founder, Anna Laza.
“In a world where no one reads anymore,” Laza said during the introduction, “where literature is replaced by AI, images and moving images, it is a photographer’s duty to tell stories with light, and to teach viewers how to decode them.”
Attendance began quietly but picked up the pace soon after the opening words. By the time our team wrapped up, the space held nearly 50 guests, with more people arriving.
Art was displayed across two levels: the main hall and the basement, which hosted the Overall Winner of the FotoSlovo Awards in Series, Carlos Folgoso, with “Beyond the Lake”, a mythical, story-rich series about the survival struggles of small Galician communities, where depopulation, climate change, and land abandonment loom like a quiet extinction.
A few of the works that caught our attention:
Minkkinen Emmi, with the “Hidden Mother” series, a modern reimagining of 19th-century studio portraits where mothers, hidden under cloth or shadow, held children still for long exposures.
MXPRIVÉ, with “Resonance of Concrete”, a dialogue between structure and vision, where architecture and poetry converge.
Inge Van Heerde, with “The Last Raw Egg”, a piece exploring fertility and motherhood through symbolism and meditation.
Piotr Skubisz, with “Gaze”, a striking portrait, so direct and piercing it turns the viewer into the subject.
Ivana Dostalova, with “Discourse with the Self”, which appers to be a confrontation with the Self, both friend and enemy, and the impossible question of “what is self?”
Jussi Hellsten, with “Kyoto Protocol” series, a thoughtfully executed meditation on environmental devastation, using infrared photography to turn bare, deforested landscapes into spectral warnings.
Delphine Troianelli, with “The Fishermen of Trinco”, a quiet moment of rest captured with painterly stillness centered on an old fisherman, and framed by the other “fishermen”: the birds.
Amelie Schander, with “Portrait of Anna”, a piece of innocence suspended in the dreamlike veil of double exposure.
Georgia Pastorelli, with “Make It Better (or Not)”, analog prints embroidered over by hand, turning trauma into a stitched metaphor, the beauty of the embroidery haunted by the pain of the needle.
As a final note, in a time (and a place) when/where contemporary artists are rarely given space, where cultural events are scarce and often dismissed, Foto Slovo’s succeeded in organizing an exhibition that felt like a rare breath of fresh air, and we salute it.
We’re a team of writers using our craft to spotlight art in its most honest form. RAWGUE. started as a bi-monthly editorial experiment where each issue’s theme is dictated by the submitted work, thus removing editorial bias from the equation and preserving a more raw approach. We focus on all forms of poetry: written, photographed, painted, drawn, and filmed.
