Federico Clavarino, from "Italia O Italia" | DER GREIF — Federico Clavarino, from "Italia O Italia"

Daniel Martinez, from "(H)" | DER GREIF — Daniel Martinez, from "(H)"

Caro Mirzoyan, from "Absolute Tehran Cats" | DER GREIF — Caro Mirzoyan, from "Absolute Tehran Cats"

Allegra Baggio Corradi, from "Homographs. A Pictionary" | DER GREIF — Allegra Baggio Corradi, from "Homographs. A Pictionary"

Eli Durst's photobook "The Children's Melody" | DER GREIF — Eli Durst's photobook "The Children's Melody"

Susanna De Vido, from "Quando torneremo a guardare le stelle" | DER GREIF — Susanna De Vido, from "Quando torneremo a guardare le stelle"

Cintia Tortosa Santisteban, "Screenshots From A Series Of Videos About A Rice Field And Its Surround | DER GREIF — Cintia Tortosa Santisteban, "Screenshots From A Series Of Videos About A Rice Field And Its Surround

Jonah Samson, from "Every Exit Is An Entrance Somewhere Else" | DER GREIF — Jonah Samson, from "Every Exit Is An Entrance Somewhere Else"

Max Pinckers, from "2020-MMXX" | DER GREIF — Max Pinckers, from "2020-MMXX"

Erli Grünzweil's photobook "Where Deer Fly and Stones Cry" | DER GREIF — Erli Grünzweil's photobook "Where Deer Fly and Stones Cry"

"Erli Grünzweil, from "Where Deer Fly And Stones Cry" | DER GREIF — "Erli Grünzweil, from "Where Deer Fly And Stones Cry"

Robyn Alysha Clemens, from "How To Carry A Home" | DER GREIF — Robyn Alysha Clemens, from "How To Carry A Home"

Greif Alumni: Highlights from the fifth edition of PhMuseum Days

Article

Sep 11, 2026

A constellation of photographic perspectives on today's world as a collective narrative

The PhMuseum Days international photography festival is a relatively new but vibrant hub for contemporary photography. It was initiated in Italy in 2021 by Giuseppe Oliverio as a real-life extension of the homonymous digital platform, PhMuseum. Held in Bologna, the epicentre of the “Viaggio in Italia” movement led by legendary photographer Luigi Ghirri in the late 1970s and 1980s, the festival is now in its fifth year under the theme “Archipelago,” which frames the festival's vision as a network of distinct yet interconnected voices and locations that collectively form a shared cultural ecosystem throughout the city. With the festival days approaching, taking place from 1 to 4 October, we briefly go through all the appointments, shows and features we're looking so much for, especially highlighting our alumni and long-time collaborators’ contributions.

PhMuseum and the festival fundamentally evolve around both discovering and supporting emerging and established photographers and visual artists, fostering an environment where legacy documentary practices converge with new voices in the field of documentary and expanded photography. This year, Federico Clavarino presents “Italia O Italia” at Ex Ospedale dei Bastardini, offering a reflection on the Italian landscape and the weight that history continues to exert on the present: a contribution he brought to Kunsthalle Darmstadt last year in the frame of “No Place Like Home” touring exhibition. At the same location, a screening will showcase twenty projects selected through a dedicated open call run by the festival, further expanding the panorama of international contemporary photography and offering a glimpse into emerging research, including our alumni’s works by Anya Tsaruk, Jonah Reenders, Josefine Rauch, Sohei Nakanishi, and the duo Tim Gassauer & Manu Gruber, who took part in our latest screening in Arles.

The festival also produces “Archipelago”, a collective exhibition showcasing, among other talents, our alumni Akshay Mahajan, André Souza, Anastasia Miseyko, Anya Tsaruk, Arne Piepke, Ariana Zukowski, Charalambos Artemis, Emilia Martin, Florence Cuschieri, Joel Jimenez, Jonah Reenders, Ludovica Limido, Marcel Top, Mehrdad Mosaferi, Tanya Traboulsi, and Thomas Martin. The exhibition is a collective installation taking over the historical courtyard of the Archiginnasio, an iconic former main building of the University of Bologna. Forty images will be printed on semi-transparent material and mounted on a scaffolding pipe system giving life to a visual ephemeral monument embedded in the urban landscape.

Geographies and imaginaries converge in the public space, from Reenders’ imagery of poetic weight on the “Armillaria ostoyae” fungus’ growing habitat and socialscape in Malheur National Forest to Miseyko’s “West of the birch trees”, a search on the meaning and faculties of belonging in migratory conditions through the performativity of photography; Traboulsi’s “Beirut, Recurring Dream” also deals with the shifting nature of place and the tension between past and present in negotiating once identity’s and belonging. Mahajan shows how physical spaces in the non-Western world come to embody unfulfilled potential due to an unresolved history, while Artemis deals with how image-making technologies have historically served as instruments of possession, surveillance, and control.

The festival’s program is further enriched on October 2, with “The Man of Family”, a free workshop led by Adam Broomberg and organized by PhMuseum in collaboration with Fondazione MAST and the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna. Taking the historic exhibition “The Family of Man” – curated by Edward Steichen at MoMA in 1955 – as a starting point, the workshop invites participants to deconstruct its narrative through collage, cut-ups, and physical interventions on the original catalog, and then re-examine its meaning using artificial intelligence tools to potentially reflect on the role of images in shaping worldviews.

To conclude, on October 3-4, the second edition of Photobook Mania will take over the green house Serra Madre, bringing together international publishers and artists like our alumni Florence Cuschieri, Maria Siorba, and Yufan Lu, presenting their recent publications “La Ronde des hirondelles” (Chose Commune), “Blank Verse” (Depart pour l’Image) and “Make Me Beautiful” (Editorial RM).

By recognizing and amplifying the work of contemporary artists whose art is conceptually and politically engaged, the festival can exhibit a resistance to the flattening of images that circulate online. The festival's theme, "Archipelago," draws from this idea by exploring identity and culture as a network of distinct islands bound together by the sea that surrounds them: a concept that acknowledges that singular, autonomous viewpoints and positionalities exist in a dynamic and recurring relationship with one another.