The Guardian:
By Sean O’Hagan
Nicolo Degiorgis contrasts the peace of prayer with the tension of politics, with many of Italy’s Muslims now forced to pray in warehouses, garages, gyms, and shops
This year’s author book award at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival went to Nicolo Degiorgis for Hidden Islam. With a foreword by Martin Parr, the man who matters most in the world of the photobook, it arrived in Arles with buzz attached from the recent photobook festival at Bristol co-curated by Parr.
Hidden Islam looks at how and where Muslims worship in Italy, a country with an estimated 1.45 million believers but only eight official mosques. In the north of Italy, where Degiorgis comes from, the rightwing party, Lega Nord, has risen in popularity lately due to its hard line on immigration and anti-Islamic views.
In Treviso, where local worshippers purchased a building, they have been prevented by the local authority from turning it into a mosque despite the right to worship being freely enshrined in Italian law. They gather weekly to lay down their prayer mats in front of the building – prayer as a kind of protest. It is against this increasingly polarised political and social backdrop, that Muslims have begun worshipping in makeshift buildings across the country. This is the subject of Degiorgis’s book: the often anonymous buildings that now have a kind of secret life.
Categories: Accepting Islam, Answers to Anti-Islam, Europe and Australia, Islamophobia