”The best thing I will bring with me from 2020 is knowing that there is power and beauty in being openly vulnerable,” says Chiara Bardelli Nonino, as she shares her highlights of 2020.
Chiara Baredlli Nonino is the photo editor of Vogue Italia and L’Uomo Vogue, all while acting as editor for the photography section of Vogue.it. As well as her editorial roles, Nonino is the co-curator of the Milan-based Photo Vogue, a festival focused on socially conscious fashion photography. With a keen eye and passion for re-labeling fashion for a non-elitist, accessible audience, Nonino has made a place for bold new images in the fashion world.
Nonino has also produced independent projects, such as Paolo Roversi – Studio Luce, an exhibition at the Ravenna Art Museum earlier this year.
Here, Nonino looks back on 2020.
Art really was one of the only things that kept me mildly sane this year. I was particularly touched by My Octopus Teacher, a lyrical documentary on the healing relationship between a burned out film-maker and an octopus – an animal that has been described as “an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behaviour”. You get the gist.
I read Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour in one sitting. It’s a hybrid of nature writing and memoir that talks about corvid minds, masculinity and the power of relationships – be it with a father or a magpie – in shaping our selves.
A ray of lighthearted joy for me was the project 55 costumes by Hubert Crabieres. During the lockdown in France, the photographer made one costume a day, styled from the objects lying around his house. It has many different meanings of course, but for me is first and foremost an ode to creativity and its gift: the ability to make the best of what you have.
I’m in love with Arca’s album KiCk i: musically and visually stunning, unique and undefinable.
I worked nonstop this year, but it helped in keeping me focused through such a surreal time. The zoom calls with Paolo Roversi during lockdown to edit Studio Luce – his “autobiography in images” – and trips to the printing house Grafiche Antiga are highlights from a pretty dreadful period.
One of my favourite exhibitions was Who is gazing?. It was the first truly contemporary show at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. 26 non-European artists from very different backgrounds explored various issues of visual representations and narratives in quite a remarkable way.
I am incredibly disappointed to have missed Tetsumi Kudo’s Cultivation at the Louisiana Museum of modern art. Kedo is a true radical artist whose work analyses the changing relations between nature and mankind.
The best new Instagram I discovered has to be Animals and Synthesizers. It has been a soothing discovery that I keep going back to.
When choosing a photograph that encapsulates 2020, I think about how our eyes are full of suffering and trauma. Being in History by Camila Falquez is a guerrilla art project, which reinvents the concepts of power and beauty, reclaiming the space and narrative of individuals that have been too long overlooked in our collective representation.
I keep thinking about the blank cover of the April 2020 issue of Vogue Italia. It was published in one of the darkest periods of our country’s recent history: an image that evokes a clean slate for a new beginning, with newfound priorities, meanings and motivations. I guess that’s what we can all hope for next year, after the prolonged existential dread we are all going through.
There are so many things I’d like to leave behind in 2020. Mainly the lack of compassion, and the overwhelming ego trips and abuses we saw in every corner of our lives, from art to politics.
There were a few things in 2020 that gave me hope. My Queer Blackness, My Black Queerness, and its celebration of the Black queer experience. The idea of inclusivity symbolised by David PD Hyde’s portrait of Ellie Goldstein for Vogue Italia and Gucci, as well as the beautiful energy of the young photographers and fashion designers I met at Hyères, and the generosity and love for their job of the people who organized and participated to Power to the models, an exhibition in Breda overturning the power dynamics at play between photographer and subject.
I also keep thinking about the heartbreaking video of an Italian man playing the accordion to his dying wife, isolated in the hospital. Maybe the best thing I will bring with me from 2020 is knowing that there is power and beauty in being openly vulnerable.
@chiaranonino
