NICOLA LO CALZO

Harmattan / Togo Photo Festival / Lomé

December 12-30, 2025

Directors and Founders Ako Atikossie & Giulia Brivio

Harmattan / Togo Photo Festival aims to stimulate imagination and visual research through photography, which becomes a means of charting new paths in the imagination that characterises West Africa, initiating new dialogues between ancient traditions and future visions, and interacting with an increasingly vibrant art scene. Among the 15 Togolese and international artists, Nicola Lo Calzo is participating in the festival with his series TCHAMBA, created in Togo in 2017.

The festival will take place in Lomé from 12 to 30 December at the Agnassan – Paul Ahyi Museum, the Artemis Gallery, the Edith Equagoo Garden and the Palais de Lomé. In 2026, the exhibition will become itinerant and will be presented from February to April 2026 in Lugano/Paradiso, Switzerland, at Focus Artphilein, then in Milan, Italy, at Loro Milano in May 2026.

http://@togophotofestival

Nicola Lo Calzo / Nego Fugido, mémoires quilombolas

MAFRA Museu Afro Brasileiro - UFBA Salvador de Bahia

November 6, 2025 - February 6, 2026

As part of the Brazil-France Season 2025, Nego Fugido by Nicola Lo Calzo is a travelling monographic exhibition presented at the Ygrec-ENSAPC Art Centre in Aubervilliers, the Alliance Française in Brasilia, the Photo Rio festival and now at MAFRA in Salvador de Bahia. The exhibition offers a sensitive immersion in a celebration of freedom, where images become a means of resistance and reappropriation. Produced in the Quilombola community of Acupe, in Bahia, Brazil, the annual staging of Nego Fugido combines ritual and performance to reconstruct, from the perspective of the descendants of slaves, the struggle for black emancipation.

Chantal Regnault / Queer Lens. A History of Photography

J. Paul Getty Museum Los Angeles

June 17 - September 28, 2025

Chantal Regnault's works are on display at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles as part of Queer Lens: A History of Photography, an exploration of the history of photography through a resolutely queer lens. The exhibition brings together a selection of works highlighting artists and subjects from the LGBTQ+ community, in order to give visibility to those who have shaped art and culture through the practice of photography, and to demonstrate that photography has been, and remains, a powerful tool for representing queer experiences.

Hannah Collins / Exposition Soy Fuego

Soy Fuego was born out of the artist's personal experiences and her extensive travels throughout Latin America - from the Colombian Amazon to the volcanoes of Michoacán, from the skies of the Atacama Desert to the forests of Veracruz - contexts in which she established close ties with local communities, sharing knowledge and rituals that shape a deeper perception of nature and its cycles.

Chantal Regnault / Publication in the catalogue Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, du Metropolitan Museum of Art

Chantal Regnault’s Avis Pendavis Ball, Red Zone (1990) is featured in the publication accompanying the Met’s latest exhibition

Abstract

Superfine: Tailoring Black Style traces the complex and vibrant legacy of menswear across three centuries of Black culture—from contemporary hip-hop aesthetics and popular street trends, to its use during the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement as a symbol of creativity and political power, and further back to its surprising origins as the mandated attire of domestic workers and enslaved people.

Organized around the key characteristics of dandyism that resonate across time—most notably presence, distinction, disguise, and respectability—this new interpretation of a centuries-old aesthetic draws on the perspectives of leading Black voices in fashion, literature, and art, including Dandy Wellington, Amy Sherald, Iké Udé, and André 3000.

Self-proclaimed dandies and high-fashion models appear in a stunning photographic essay by artist Tyler Mitchell, who also contributes evocative new images of garments designed by contemporary creators such as Virgil Abloh, Pharrell Williams, and Grace Wales Bonner. These works are presented alongside historical ensembles worn by iconic Black figures including Frederick Douglass, Alexandre Dumas père, Muhammad Ali, and André Leon Talley.

Scholar Monica L. Miller situates these objects within their broader cultural context, demonstrating how the evolution of dandy style has inspired new visions of Black masculinity, using the power of dress and attire as a means of self-expression.

Vue de l’exposition « Engagées » à la Fondation Villa Datris, 2025 - Photo©Bertrand Michau, ADAGP, Paris - 2025

Anita Dube / Exposition Engagées, à la Fondation Villa Datris

Anita Dube's works are on display at the Villa Datris Foundation as part of the Engagées exhibition, alongside 64 female artists from 28 countries, whose creations explore major contemporary issues : feminism, ecology, human rights, the fight against racism, freedom of choice over one's own body, and more. The exhibition highlights the invisibility of women and the persistence of their struggles, reminding us how crucial it is to preserve the rights they have won.

Nicola Lo Calzo / Exhibition Nego Fugido, Quilombolas memories @Centre d’art Ygrec – ENSAPC

Nicolas Lo Calzo is pleased to invite you to discover the exhibition “Nego Fugido, Quilombola Memories” at Ygrec – ENSAPC Art Center, a photographic project developed in collaboration with the Nego Fugido Cultural Association as part of his practice-based PhD at CY Cergy Paris University.

This work focuses on Nego Fugido, an Afro-Brazilian cultural and spiritual practice as well as a vital space of consciousness for past and contemporary struggles in Brazil. It forms part of the Kam project, a research initiative launched in 2010 by Nicolas Lo Calzo exploring contemporary memories of resistance to slavery and marronage.

Curated by Ioana Mello within the framework of the France–Brazil Season 2025, the exhibition will subsequently be presented at the Alliance Française of Brasília, the FotoRio festival, and the Afro-Brazilian Museum (MAFRO) in Bahia.

Chantal Regnault / Exhibition DISCO : I’M COMING OUT, Philharmonie de Paris

Chantal Regnault's works are on display at the Philharmonie de Paris as part of the DISCO : I'M COMING OUT exhibition.

Born in the United States in the early 1970's, disco music quickly became a global phenomenon. Contrary to clichés, this exhibition does justice to the dazzling power of this music, which is deeply rooted in the history and culture of Black America, heir to soul, gospel and funk.

A collection of audiovisual archives, photographs, instruments and costumes highlights the political and festive dimension of this music, which brought together different minorities and social classes on the dance floor, united in the same hedonistic spirit.

Exhibition co-curated by Jean-Yves Leloup, Marion Challier and Patrick Thévenin.

🗓️ February 14 - July 17, 2025 📍 Philharmonie de Paris, France

Nicolas Lo Calzo / Doctoral defence : “Queer and Maroon Photography : Representing Memories of Slavery in the Postcolonial Era”

Doctoral artist Nicolas Lo Calzo will defend his thesis, Queer and Maroon Photography : Representing Memories of Slavery in the Postcolonial Era, on June 5 at the Ygrec Art Centre – ENSPAC.

This thesis brings together two complementary dimensions of art research: a photographic practice developed around memories of resistance to slavery, and more specifically around the memory of the Nego Fugido in the community of Acupe in Brazil (Bahia); and a theoretical reflection on the driving forces behind "queer and maroon photography", conceived as a way of "seeing from below" as well as "sideways". This work thus questions photography's ability to restore subaltern memories and deconstruct hegemonic imaginaries, combining aesthetics, ethics, and critical thinking.

Supervised by Sylvie Brodziak (CY Cergy Paris University) and Corinne Diserens (Hamburger Kunsthalle, ETH Zurich).