Her documentary project What is living a “normal” life? shows the everyday lives of children with special needs. Polona said: “In Slovenia, approximately 1 in every 10 children has special needs. They make up a significant portion of the population and yet we, as a society, tend to pretend they don’t exist. But they do. This photo essay shows just how common this situation is and how families have adapted to the challenges of a special needs child, creating nurturing, loving environments.”

So far, Polona has photographed six families with special needs kids. She visits them in their homes and spends time documenting their everyday life and witnesses their life unfolding in front of her eyes and camera. “Many parents want their children to be perfect, the smartest-best athlete-overachievers, but in reality that does not exist. Every child is a lesson for a parent if they are willing to hear it”, she said.

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Everyone has to decide for themselves”.

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About his series All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain, inspired by Roy Batty/Bladerunner, Peter wrote: “An intimate process of daydreaming dwells in a secluded part of reality. Paraphrasing of the used material, as a visual focal point of the series, intentionally overlooks the cultural iconography and employs it in a purely superficial quest for emotivity. The working process interweaves planned subjectivity and objective moments of error, and coincidence. The counterpoint between the naivety of search for beauty and the dangers of ignorance underlines the project, but it must remain unseen by the observer. What remains to be seen is a search for emotions, as a response to the rational anxiety regarding our existence and reality of it”.

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She said: “I view utopia as a vision, an opinion, or the creation of something that protects me from hopelessness. This work questions whether our utopias are directed against the world, or is utopia the only way to make this world bearable?”

Rina is a photographer and visual artist with a Masters Degree in Fine Arts. She has exhibited her work in the USA, Australia, Canada, the UK, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Spain and Sweden. Her work has been shown in many other festivals around the world.

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Simon Chang has been living and working as a documentary photographer in Europe since 2003, mainly focusing on stories about people whose voices were rarely heard, communities marginalized by mainstream society, and mental health issues in post-conflict regions. He has been based in Slovenia since 2010.

About his series Hawler Psychiatric Hospital, he wrote: “In the Iraqi Kurdistan capital of Erbil, the Hawler Psychiatric Hospital (locals refer to Erbil as Hawler) sits directly across from the Royal Mall, the largest modern shopping mall in the city. The Royal Mall is one of the first commercial malls in Iraqi Kurdistan; Hawler Psychiatric Hospital is the only psychiatric facility that admits male patients in Erbil.

In the corner of the lobby, a drinking fountain leaks continuously but no one takes notice. Diagonally across that, a few patients reached their arms through the bars while twisting empty plastic bottles, but no one cared. I noticed the cheeks of a few young nurses were marked with scratches. The chief physician remarked, “Most of our patients suffer from moderate or severe psychosis. They have auditory or visual hallucinations, some even have paranoia. They are unable to differentiate reality from fantasy—”. Before the chief could finish his explanation, a man roared frantically from the end of the hallway. The garbled noise sounded like it emerged from far beneath the earth or from the depths of a dark well.

And the drinking fountain goes on leaking, yet the crowd in front of the mall will never have the opportunity to hear it…”

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Her series “Generated Island” is based on the observation of online travels, which in the face of ongoing pandemics and isolation, becomes the only fully safe way to travel. Unable to travel further afield, Ewa explores digital technologies, which offer enormous creative freedom. “By experimenting with new technologies, I attempted to develop a new kind of artistic self-expression, appropriate for the digital age,” Ewa said.

Ewa’s work has been exhibited widely in galleries and at art festivals, among others: Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń, Historic Centre of Athens, Propaganda Gallery in Warsaw, Museum of Angra do Heroismo on the Azores, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts in Vancouver, Fait Gallery in Brno, Vilnius Photography Gallery, Exgirlfriend Gallery in Berlin.

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Wanting to better understand the forceful disconnection from reality through shell shock, Matthijs started researching various therapies conducted on soldiers returning from the trenches of WWI. “Imagine soldiers from WWI, with various degrees of hysterical dysfunctions being treated with music, drawing flowers and set to dance to mend physical routines as well overcoming mental isolation…” He has visited the Flemish and French war sites, forests that still bear the scars of where millions of men have died. He has also dived deep into the archives of war hospitals and has looked for early experimental treatments such as ergotherapy – a type of treatment that uses dancing, movement and drawing.

Dancing Notes, his series of photographs and found materials, revisits some of the war sites in Belgium and France but also includes maps of Edinburgh, ’dancing notes’ of movement, ball booklets in which these men noted their dancing partners for the evening, tunnels and remnants of bunkers. The project is about isolation and detachment from reality, and the road to reconnection through social interaction and the art of movement.

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He worked at the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo as a photographer and deputy photo editor, and currently works as an independent photographer. About his project Breathless made during this pandemic, he wrote: “In 2020, at the beginning of my isolation in Brazil, I felt in a state of mental disorder unable to think about the future. The feelings of anguish, confusion, and suffocation took over my daily life as the news about Covid-19 came in. Locked up at home, I started to use the camera to try to find a way out and to re-signify the banal from my microcosm.

I started to look at my microcosm in an aseptic and also orderly way because everything outside was too confusing. For me, organizing what is inside involves looking poetically and meticulously at what is around me.”

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