INTERVIEW with Anna Zhang
Carmela Loiacono talks with Anna Zhang who took part in the International Art Exhibition NEW HORIZONS – Authenticity, Resilience and Renewal in Matera, at Casa Cava, from March 21 to 27, 2026.

Carmela Loiacono – In TO YOU, AFTER ALL TIME, the continuous cycle of melting and regrowth visualizes the process of grief. How did you find a balance between representing a deeply personal loss and creating a universal language that can speak to anyone? 
Anna Zhang – I chose not to tell a specific story, but to translate the feeling of grief into a visual system—its repetition, instability, and transformation. By using abstract processes like melting and regrowth, the work leaves space for viewers to project their own experiences. That distance allows something deeply personal to become universally relatable.

Carmela Loiacono – The animation transforms pain into fluid visual matter. Can you share how your choices in movement, color, and rhythm helped shape such an intimate experience?
Anna Zhang – I treated the animation as a living system. Forms continuously change but never fully return, reflecting how grief evolves. The color palette is restrained and gradual, while the rhythm moves between stillness and slow transformation—almost like breathing—making the experience feel intimate rather than overwhelming.

Carmela Loiacono – Memory in your work emerges as an ever-evolving element. Looking back on the creative process of this video, how has the work transformed your own personal understanding of loss and remembrance?
Anna Zhang – It shifted my view of grief from something to resolve into something to live with. Memory became less fixed and more fluid—constantly reshaped over time. The process helped me accept that loss doesn’t disappear, it transforms and stays with us in different ways.

Carmela Loiacono – What future directions or projects do you envision for your video and animation practice, and how do you plan to continue exploring emotional transformation through new visual languages?
Anna Zhang – I’m interested in expanding into installations and interactive systems, where viewers can physically engage with these transformations. I’m also exploring AI and simulation as tools to build new visual languages—less about representing emotion, and more about letting people experience it through change and time.

INTERVIEW with Rubén Avendaño
Carmela Loiacono talks with Rubén Avendaño who took part in the International Art Exhibition NEW HORIZONS – Authenticity, Resilience and Renewal in Matera, at Casa Cava, from March 21 to 27, 2026.

Carmela Loiacono – You often speak about attention rather than intention.  While making “Playa Vista”, was there a moment when you simply knew it was time  to stop and stay with what was unfolding?  What do you notice in yourself in that instant?
Rubén Avendaño – At Playa Vista, I saw a couple with their dog, sharing the last light of the day. Then, for a brief moment, she stepped into her own space and turned toward the horizon. Her silhouette revealed itself, held gently by the trees, while the sun softened into a tone that felt almost intentional, though it wasn’t mine. It all aligned without effort.
In that instant, something in me becomes still and receptive. There is no urge to direct or interfere, only to witness and respond. I feel a sense of recognition, like I am being let in on something that was already happening long before I arrived. What remains is gratitude, for the light, for the timing, and for the chance to hold a fragment of that experience and carry it forward. 

Carmela Loiacono – The shift from color to black and white feels less like an effect and more like a quiet transition in perception.  Did that shift belong to the moment itself, or did it reveal itself later, with distance? 
Rubén Avendaño – The shift to black and white didn’t feel like a choice I made in the moment. It came later, with a bit of distance. But when I looked back, it felt like it had always belonged that way. Sometimes color carries too much information, and with time you begin to see what was underneath it. The black and white revealed something more essential, something that was already there but harder to recognize at first.

Carmela Loiacono – Your images seem to hold space rather than define it.  How do you recognize when a photograph has said enough, and it’s time to leave the rest open?
Rubén Avendaño – For me, a photograph feels complete when it stops asking for anything. There’s a point where adding more begins to take away from it. I try to listen for that. It’s subtle, but it’s there. When the image holds its own weight without explanation, I know it’s time to step back and leave the rest open.

Carmela Loiacono – Your work is deeply rooted in presence — in being there, attentive to what emerges.  When the work travels without you, do you feel that presence remains, or does it transform into something else?
Rubén Avendaño – Presence changes once the work leaves me. When I’m there, it’s very physical, very immediate. But once the photograph travels, it becomes something quieter. I don’t think the presence disappears, but it transforms. It belongs to the viewer now, to their own pace and their own way of seeing. What I felt in the moment becomes just one layer among many.

Carmela Loiacono – As your practice continues to evolve, what are you currently moving toward?
Is there something you feel you are beginning to see, or understand, that you weren’t ready for before?
Rubén Avendaño – Lately, I feel like I’m moving toward less. Less certainty, less control. I’m becoming more interested in what I don’t immediately understand. There’s a kind of patience I didn’t have before, a willingness to stay with things longer without needing to resolve them. I think I’m starting to see that not everything needs to be translated. Some things are meant to remain just as they are.

INTERVIEW with Marc Raynaud
Carmela Loiacono talks with Marc Raynaud who took part in the International Art Exhibition NEW HORIZONS – Authenticity, Resilience and Renewal in Matera, at Casa Cava, from March 21 to 27, 2026.

Carmela Loiacono – Your works, including “Concert à Venise”, “Dialogue avec l’invisible, Amalfitana Coast”, “Femme étrusque songeuse” and “Matin calme aux Marquises”, reveal a dialogue between memory, myth, and landscape. How do you transform fragments of experience and place into a poetic act of resilience through your collages? 
Marc Raynaud – The Invisible is everywhere. « Don’t forget to draw what you do not see », used to tell my former teacher at The  Fine Arts School in Paris.  
Memory is what is the most visible, what we have seen. The Invisible is the Future, what is lying behind us, in our back as the African say. Our Past is in front of us. Under the rocks of my Art Studio in front of Capri, the mermaids became stone statues when Ulysses stopped by with his navigators. I guess other people also see these invisible queens.
The spot is called « Punta Licosa » (Mermaid Point) in San Marco di Castellabate where yo can visit my Art Studio.

Carmela Loiacono – Collage, for you, is a slower, contemplative process in a world dominated by photography. How does this meditative approach influence your perception of authenticity and the renewal of the inner self? 
Marc Raynaud – I practice Collage silently in the morning before anything moves in the house. So immediately I am back into childhood and can think about the charming schoolteachers I had when I was four or six (and not sixty four). I am still in love with them like all my little classmates.
I can see all the little boys in the classroom and name them all on the class picture of the year. I may even pray for them for no reason and without them knowing. Or may be they now.
Who knows?
I slowly take off in my souvenirs and mix them with new dreams and songs that I have not sung for decades. Doing so I meditate and follow with humility my cutter and the sheet of paper who drive me towards the emerging piece of Art that progressively appears. I am grateful to the glue, the tool and the paper that allow this to happen.

Carmela Loiacono – Across your travels from Africa and Asia to Polynesia and southern Italy your works capture both external landscapes and inner journeys. How does the act of recomposing reality through collage allow you to explore renewal and personal transformation?
Marc Raynaud – Recomposing Reality is fun. Another Art teacher of mine, who was crazy enough, used to tell us that who are allowed to lie when drawing or painting  because nobody else sees what we see anyway.
When practicing Collage, silence and patience allow me to discern among all the lies I have been taught when I was a child and until now.
Getting aware of them allow me to feel lighter and even freer today. Freedom, the great privilege of the artist!
The same miracle happens when I realize  all that was forbidden when I was a young boy. Overcoming these forbidden barriers allowed me to discover new landscapes and worlds.
Without these former barriers I would not have the same personality and pleasure today. Thank you Mum!

Carmela Loiacono – Looking forward, are there new directions, projects, or places that inspire you to further develop your collage practice and continue exploring the interplay between memory, light, and identity?
Marc Raynaud – Recently I have made a serie of abstract collages that may look like dating from the 30’ or 50’. Playing and creating in the time when I was born and before was an unexpected and very joyful journey. The result was a broader view of my art.
Even if my Muse did not like this serie of abstract collages too much at the beginning, I showed them to visitors who came to my Art studio near Capri.
And some of them who knew me immediately said « Now we know you and understand you even better ! ».

INTERVIEW with Bassem H. Boustany
Carmela Loiacono talks with Bassem H. Boustany who took part in the International Art Exhibition NEW HORIZONS – Authenticity, Resilience and Renewal in Matera, at Casa Cava, from March 21 to 27, 2026.

Carmela Loiacono – During the inauguration, it was a true honor to meet you and experience your presence firsthand. Your diptych “Threshold of the Unseen” shows, in the first panel (Held), a blurred figure gently holding a feather, a symbol of fragility and memory, and in the second panel (Passed), the figure moves toward a luminous threshold. Do you see these moments as an arrival, a departure, or something that exists in between?
How do you capture, in your photographic process, the tension between presence and transition, between stillness and movement, and between fragility and the opening toward new horizons?
Bassem H. Boustany – I don’t see these two moments as a clear arrival or departure. For me, they exist in between, in that brief instant where something is about to shift but has not yet resolved.
The first image, Held, is more introspective, almost suspended. The second, Passed, suggests movement, but without certainty. It is not clear whether the figure is entering or leaving. That ambiguity is important to me.
In my process, I use movement intentionally to reduce clarity. By doing so, the image moves away from description and becomes more open. The subject is no longer fixed, it becomes a presence rather than a figure.
This is where the tension appears. Not between opposites, but within the same moment. Stillness carries movement, and fragility carries a form of strength. I try not to resolve that tension, only to remain close to it.

Carmela Loiacono – Furthermore, “The Invention of Memory” evokes memory not as recollection, but as a creative construction. When photographing, how do you distinguish between what is “remembered” and what is emerging, imagined, or invented in that very moment?
Bassem H. Boustany – For me, memory is not something we retrieve, it is something we reconstruct.
When I photograph, I am not documenting a moment as it is. The use of movement and blur transforms what I see into something that already feels distant, almost like a memory forming in real time.
So I don’t really distinguish between what is remembered and what is imagined. The image exists somewhere in between. It is both a trace of something real and a projection of something internal. What interests me is precisely that instability, when the image is not fully defined and remains open to interpretation.

Carmela Loiacono – You wrote a beautiful reflection on the exhibition on your website, which I particularly appreciated. How does it feel to see your images engage with the architecture, light, and atmosphere of Matera, a city you could personally explore, and how has that experience influenced your sense of memory, presence, and awareness?
Bassem H. Boustany – Being in Matera was a very particular experience. It is a place where time feels layered rather than sequential. You don’t feel that the past is behind you. It is still present, embedded in the stone, in the spaces, and in the way the city unfolds.
Seeing my work in that environment felt natural. The ideas of transition and threshold were already part of the city itself. The architecture, the light, and even the silence carry that same sense of continuity and transformation.
It made me realize that the work was not only placed in Matera, but in some way aligned with it. The images did not need to adapt, they were already in dialogue with the space.

Carmela Loiacono – Reflecting on your work “Street Chronicles: Taipei Through the Viewfinder”, in which you explored fleeting moments of urban life and the poetry of the everyday, how do you see this approach evolving in your future projects?
Are there new themes, spaces, or ways of capturing memory and transition that you are beginning to explore?
Bassem H. Boustany – This project started in 2017, during a period when I was spending time in Taipei for work. It was a moment of observation, where I was capturing fragments of the city and its daily life.
I cannot say that today I have a fixed style. I am still exploring different approaches, whether urban photography, movement-based work, or black and white landscapes.
Black and white, for me, is not a nostalgic choice. It is a way to simplify and to focus on structure, light, and contrast. It removes distraction and allows the image to speak in a more direct and essential way. It is also closely related to my background as an architect, where form, rhythm, and composition are fundamental.
I try not to limit myself to a specific theme or style. I prefer to let the lens respond freely to what is in front of me, capturing moments as they come, without forcing a predefined intention. What connects the work is not a subject, but a way of seeing.
At the same time, I continue to develop my fine art approach. For me, art is not about conveying information, but about formation. It is a continuous process of learning, refining, and questioning. Every day brings new influences and new ways of seeing.
With my book Vibrant Urbanism in Riyadh, I explored the city through movement and abstraction, using techniques such as intentional camera movement and multiple exposures. The intention was not to document the city, but to express its energy, its rhythm, and the emotions felt within it.
Currently, I am working on a new project titled DRIFT, which continues this exploration. The work moves further away from representation and closer to sensation, where the image becomes less about place and more about perception.
In that sense, the themes I am beginning to explore are less tied to specific locations and more to states of transition, where the image exists between clarity and disappearance, between presence and absence. I am also interested in spaces that are not necessarily defined physically, but felt emotionally, where memory is not fixed, but continuously shifting.
I am no longer trying to capture a moment. I am trying to remain within it, at the point where it begins to dissolve.

INTERVIEW with Chenglin Li
Carmela Loiacono talks with Chenglin Li who took part in the International Art Exhibition NEW HORIZONS – Authenticity, Resilience and Renewal in Matera, at Casa Cava, from March 21 to 27, 2026.

Carmela Loiacono – In “Algorithmic Genome”, identity is constructed through generative principles such as rhythm, mutation, and entropy, creating a system that continuously evolves. How do you perceive this shifting balance between human intention and algorithmic autonomy, and where do you locate yourself within this process?
Chenglin Li – In Algorithmic Genome, I do not perceive the relationship between human intention and algorithmic autonomy as a fixed boundary, but rather as a living threshold—fluid, unstable, and never entirely resolved. The system is initiated through a set of conditions, rules, sensitivities, latent rhythms, yet once activated, it unfolds into behaviours that exceed precise anticipation.
My role is not to prescribe form, but to cultivate the conditions from which form may emerge. I establish an initial logic, then remain within the process as both observer and participant, attentive to its deviations, its mutations, its quiet assertions of independence. Authorship, in this sense, is neither relinquished nor imposed; it is negotiated. I situate myself within a field of attunement, where intention and emergence coexist in a sustained, productive tension.

Carmela Loiacono – Your work suggests that the real risk is not the replacement of the artist, but the unconscious assimilation of computational logic. 
How can artists remain aware and authentic while working within systems that subtly shape perception, imagination, and aesthetic language?
Chenglin Li – The risk, as I understand it, lies not in replacement, but in absorption—in the gradual internalisation of computational logic as an unexamined aesthetic instinct. These systems do not merely generate images; they recalibrate perception itself: how we see, anticipate, and recognise form.
To remain authentic is to resist this silent drift towards automated thought. It demands a sustained awareness of the systems we engage with; their architectures, their limitations, and their embedded biases. Authenticity arises through friction: through the acts of editing, interrupting, and interrogating outputs, rather than passively accepting them as resolved.
In this regard, awareness is not external to practice; it constitutes the practice. It is an ongoing reflection on how perception is constructed, and a deliberate effort to reassert authorship within that construction.

Carmela Loiacono – By using AI as a “cognitive engine” to generate the structure of the artwork, you create a tension between collaboration and influence. Do you see this relationship as a form of co-authorship, or rather as a space of resistance where the artist must actively reclaim agency?
Chenglin Li – I would not describe this relationship as co-authorship in the traditional sense, as the system does not possess intention; it produces variation rather than meaning. What it offers is a field of possibilities: a proliferation of forms that require selection, framing, and interpretation.
Rather than a space of resistance, I understand this as a process of calibration. The artist must remain actively engaged, guiding, filtering, and reshaping what emerges, so that the work does not collapse into mere output. Agency is not reclaimed through opposition, but sustained through attention.
It is within this continuous act of calibration, between control and surrender, precision and openness, that the work attains its coherence.

Carmela Loiacono – Within the context of NEW HORIZONS, your work reflects on transformation as an inevitable condition. Looking ahead, how do you envision the future of artistic identity in an AI-driven world, and what role can artists play in redefining what it means to remain human?
Chenglin Li – In an AI-driven landscape, artistic identity may gradually detach from medium and instead become rooted in modes of thinking, in how one constructs systems, orchestrates processes, and frames experience. As tools become increasingly ubiquitous, distinction will no longer reside in their use, but in how perception itself is shaped.
Within this context, the artist assumes the role of a navigator of complexity, capable of revealing the latent structures embedded within technological systems, exposing their assumptions, and proposing alternative modes of engagement.
To remain human is not to resist technology, but to remain present within it, to preserve intentionality, sensitivity, and critical awareness. It is to continue shaping meaning within an environment that increasingly automates form, and to insist that behind every system there persists the possibility of reflection, of choice, of consciousness.

INTERVIEW with Christopher B Fowler
Carmela Loiacono talks with Christopher B. Fowler who took part in the International Art Exhibition NEW HORIZONS – Authenticity, Resilience and Renewal in Matera, at Casa Cava, from March 21 to 27, 2026.

Carmela Loiacono – In the works “A Splash of Red”, “Feel the Wind Blow II”, “Along the Towpath VI”, and “Redbud”, the tree does not appear as a simple element of the landscape, but as an autonomous, almost human presence, capable of resisting and transforming over time.
How did this vision of the tree as a symbol of silent resilience and persistent identity emerge, and what does this subject represent in your artistic journey?
Christopher B Fowler – On my website (www.christopherbfowler-photographer.com) I have three quotes that have particularly resonated with me: 
The first is from Dylan Thomas who said that art is about telling the truth.  The second is from Georgia O’Keeffe who said that what appeals to us about mountains and rocks and trees is not that they’re mountains and rocks and trees but rather the lines, planes, textures, etc., they present to us.  And the third is from Joseph Campbell who said it’s the task of the artist to reveal the radiance behind the physical reality.  
The short answer, as per the Georgia O’Keeffe quote, is that trees have the characteristics that people are–and I am–drawn to.
There have always been trees around me.  My father was a schoolteacher and I grew up on the campus of the school, which sat on 300 acres of land much of which was wooded.  There was even a modest arboretum.  I was climbing trees even as a small child.  (Memorably, I fell from the top of a full-sized fir tree at the age of four, or or five at the most–memorably particularly for my mother, who saw the whole thing from the kitchen window–though I remained uninjured). The school had long lunch hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I would often spend the time before classes resumed walking around the arboretum and sitting in the shade of the trees. 
One of my Dad’s assignments every year was organizing and running a film festival and, one year, he screened a short film by the filmmaker Donald Fox (“Omega”) that included the image of a tall tree, shot from below, arching with the wind—an image I’ve never forgotten and one which undergirds my sense of trees’ resilience. 
Trees as metaphors also came into my consciousness at some point thereafter—something attached to the earth but reaching up towards the sky, while at the same time, reaching, equally, down into the darkness of the earth.  They may not finally be anthropomorphic models of us, but they are certainly evocative of the same drives and desires that we have.

Carmela Loiacono – You have described your creative process as one in which images often “find” you. How does this moment of recognition unfold, and how do you translate a perceived experience into a photograph that preserves that same intensity? 
Christopher B Fowler – I’m afraid It truly has been that I’m just caught by something I see and then photograph it.  I’ve since come to recognize, at least provisionally, that it is likely the interplay of the abstract elements, as per Georgia O’Keeffe above, that gets my attention. I should add there have also been times when I was composing a shot I thought I’d wanted, when, out of the corner of my eye or the edge of the viewfinder, I spotted something additional, the inclusion of which was, then, what truly made the picture.

Carmela Loiacono – Your photographs seem to reveal something beyond the visible, transforming everyday elements into meaningful experiences. How do you work to make this deeper, almost invisible dimension perceptible within the image?
Christopher B Fowler – The distinction between ”depiction” and ”art”, as I see it, is that the latter involves not just conveying the image of the subject but the experience of it. 
I’ve heard it said of the painter Constable that he thought, if he painted things carefully enough, he would reveal the hand of God. 
Certainly one other aspect of when I’m looking through the lens I feel a sense of connection to… something (the radiance behind the day to day reality, as per Joseph Campbell quote above?). It’s part of the experience to be conveyed to the viewer. 
As regards my creative process, the task is to become clear, in what I’m seeing, as to what exactly it is that is catching my attention, then compose the image to include what is supporting it and disinclude, or at least minimize, what is distracting or detracting from it.

Carmela Loiacono – Looking ahead, what new horizons do you feel drawn to explore in your photographic practice? Will you continue developing this research on nature as presence, or are you envisioning new visual and conceptual directions?
Christopher B Fowler – At the moment, I’m not feeling led to go off in any new directions stylistically.  What is evolving are the subjects I’m discovering I can apply it to—and the range of subjects I move between now seems, itself, pretty broad, as the attached images show. 
I remember talking to an abstract-art painter who said she periodically went back and forth between figurative and abstract work.  Moving back and forth amongst the various subjects that I’m drawn to, as well as to new ones that catch my eye, is probably the more likely trajectory I’ll be following.
But we’ll see…

INTERVIEW with Ekaterina Zaznova
Carmela Loiacono talks with Ekaterina Zaznova who took part in the International Art Exhibition NEW HORIZONS – Authenticity, Resilience and Renewal in Matera, at Casa Cava, from March 21 to 27, 2026.

Carmela Loiacono – Your watercolor “Through the Fear” uses floral forms to symbolize distinct fears and inner obstacles. How did the process of translating these emotions into tangible botanical imagery help you explore your own personal resilience?
Ekaterina Zaznova – My watercolor “Through the Fear” is a deeply personal work for me, as it reflects three fundamental fears that almost everyone encounters in life: the fear of the unknown, the fear of judgment, and the fear of failure.
As a creative person, I am very familiar with these fears myself. I came to art not immediately, but after making a radical life change in my early 30s.
Through this process, I realized that my fears were not obstacles, but in fact became the most powerful points of my growth. Translating these emotions into botanical forms allowed me to gently observe and transform them, turning something invisible into something tangible and meaningful.

Carmela Loiacono – The delicate chains and golden keys in your composition act as both constraints and opportunities. How do these elements reflect your understanding of vulnerability as a transformative and empowering force?
Ekaterina Zaznova – There is a phrase that has always guided me in life: “There are always at least six ways out of even the most difficult situation.” 
The keys in my work symbolize these possible exits from fear. However, even when we have access to these “keys,” we are not always internally strong enough to use them – and that is where vulnerability exists.
At the same time, I believe that true strength is born именно through vulnerability and the act of overcoming it. In this sense, the chains and keys represent both limitation and potential – a moment of choice where transformation becomes possible.

Carmela Loiacono – Watercolor is a medium known for its unpredictability and fluidity. How does the inherent nature of this medium influence the balance between control and surrender in your artistic practice?
Ekaterina Zaznova – Watercolor is a unique and complex medium, often considered one of the most challenging in visual art due to its unpredictability.
For me, the balance between control and surrender depends on the intention of the work. There are moments when precision and structure are required, and others when I intentionally allow the medium to flow freely.
This dialogue between control and release is essential – it brings a sense of lightness, movement, and authenticity to the piece. In a way, working with watercolor becomes a reflection of life itself: learning when to guide and when to let go. 

Carmela Loiacono – As you continue your artistic journey, how do you envision evolving the “Flower Talismans” series or exploring new directions in your work that engage with authenticity, courage, and renewal?
Ekaterina Zaznova – The “Flower Talismans” series is a very significant part of my artistic journey. It marked the beginning of my exploration into my own identity and inner world, as well as the development of my authorial technique combining watercolor and alcohol.
This series is deeply connected to themes of self-discovery, courage, and transformation. Moving forward, I see it evolving into more complex narratives – expanding both visually and conceptually.
At the same time, I am interested in exploring new directions that continue to engage with authenticity and emotional depth, while pushing the boundaries of the medium and my own artistic language.