Giada Moro, Gruppo folclorico Santu Predu, Parco di Colle Sant’Onofrio, Nuoro. © Nicola Lo Calzo

Brigantinas

Nicola Lo Calzo

2024 — Sardinia, Italy

About this series

Brigantinas by Nicola Lo Calzo weaves together historical memory, political struggle, and visual representation to reflect on the forms of coloniality in Sardinia and the forms of dissidence developed by its communities, notably the role played by Sardinian women in shaping local and collective memory. 
The work embarks on a visual and conceptual journey through the island, exploring the deep and complex relationship between Sardinian identity and the land — not only as physical territory, but also as a symbolic space of conflict, belonging, subjectivation, and utopia.
The project, curated by Sardinian curators Elisa Medde and Giangavino Pazzola, unfolds across a genealogy of struggles and resistances, from 19th-century peasant revolts to contemporary protests against extractivism, militarization, and neoliberal policies.
Brigantinas highlights other ways in which Sardinian people express their relationship to the land, such as major religious and secular festivals. In this sense, the project interrogates the ambiguous role of “tradition,” which oscillates between identity-building and normalization, and examines how it is mobilized within contemporary dynamics of cultural representation, commodification, and tourism.
Photography becomes both a critical and poetic tool to question mechanisms of representation and the visual apparatuses of power that have historically contributed to the construction of Sardinian otherness within the national narrative. Lo Calzo sets the anthropometric gaze of 19th-century police archives against the defiant, living gaze of contemporary Sardinians, addressing a visual stratigraphy of Sardinian dissidence.  It is a call to build a shared and critical archive of forgotten memories — an act of resistance against erasure.

Nicola Marcello, falconer and inhabitant of Gavoi. Nicola has a detailed knowledge of his territory and its history. Unlike many of his peers, forced to emigrate to the continent, he chose to stay in his hometown, managing a bar business, the art of the falconer and raising goats. © Nicola Lo Calzo
“Sa precca e sos bandios”, The bandits’ cave, (collaborative image, from left to right, Giuseppe, known as Pinuccio, Nicola, Damiano, Alessio and Noemi) Gavoi, Nuoro. © Nicola Lo Calzo
Costiolu Farm, Nuoro. © Nicola Lo Calzo
Limestone on a trailer truck, Gavoi. The Sardinian mining industry remains an important activity in the regional economy. A 2017 study by Legambiente shows how Sardinia is experiencing a sort of year zero in regulation. © Nicola Lo Calzo
Chiara, member of transfeminist collective Bruxas Ogliastrinas, Arbatax. © Nicola Lo Calzo
Horse accident along the pilgrimage road to the sanctuary of San Francesco di Lula. © Nicola Lo Calzo
Vittoria Marras, actor and inhabitant of Nuoro, in the role of chief revolt Paska Zau (Nuoro 1808-1882), during the filming of Su Connuttu, Cascina Costiolu, Nuoro. © Nicola Lo Calzo
© Nicola Lo Calzo
Antonella Forcu e Stefania Nieddu, vestite da vedova secondo il costume tradizionale di Sennori, Gruppo Janas di Sennori, Cortile dell’Istituto Salesiano Don Bosco, Festa di Sant’Efisio, Cagliari. Antonella Forcu and Stefania Nieddu, dressed as widows in traditional Sennori costume, members of Janas di Sennori Group, Courtyard of the Don Bosco Salesian Institute, Feast of Sant'Efisio, Cagliari. © Nicola Lo Calzo
Fuoco durante una performance dei gruppi di maschere tradizionali a Cabras. Fire during a performance of traditional mask groups in Cabras. © Nicola Lo Calzo

Photographer: Nicola Lo Calzo
Nationality: Italian
Based in: Italy
Website: www.nicolalocalzo.com
Instagram: @nicolalocalzo

Nicola Lo Calzo (Turin, 1979) is an Italian photographer, curator, and researcher whose work focuses on themes of memory, identity, and marginality in a postcolonial context. His long-term documentary projects often explore how communities preserve or reclaim cultural memory in the face of marginalization and historical erasure. Since 2010, he has been working on the Cham/Kam project, a multi-year photographic series exploring the legacy of slavery and resistance across the Atlantic world, from West Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas. Lo Calzo’s work is deeply rooted in field-based and participatory research, and he frequently collaborates with local communities, historians, and institutions. His projects have been exhibited internationally and published in major outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Le Monde, Libération, Internazionale, and National Geographic. In addition to his photography, he is active in academia and curatorial practice, often intersecting visual storytelling with scholarship on colonial history, memory politics, and queer and decolonial thought.