As part of the AIPAI Photo Contest 2023, designed to raise awareness and promote the culture of industry, the memory of work, the architectural, technological and landscape heritage of industrial archaeology, Fondazione MAIRE supported the Premio Mecenati di Giovani Talenti Under 35, assigned to the young Claudia Mencarelli, author of the “Lo scrigno” project dedicated to the Ex Alc.Este distillery in Ferrara. 

The work is a precise story – declares the jury – of this young photographer who offers us an artist's look at industrial architecture and gives us a profound vision of the possible protection of this heritage where nature emerges in the details. And everything is wrapped in soft, warm color in this visual "treasure chest" of memory and the unobserved. The precise, clear and poetic attention of the photographs of these spaces of a former distillery in Ferrara, witnesses of a bygone era, give a strong narrative value to the entire photographic project. Fondazione MAIRE thus continues its work in support of young artistic talents who know how to interpret the human and technological challenges of the present and future in a new way and with transversal sensitivity, with a multidisciplinary approach capable of bringing together art, photography, industry, man, environment.

Fondazione MAIRE will offer the winner a work contract of 1,000 euros for the creation of a photographic project dedicated to the MAIRE historical archive.