Accidentally Found Out

Accidentally Found Out

Federica Belli, Italy

Arturo Delgado, curator

Leonardo Caffo, texto

Once upon a time one would have said: Human beings? This is the final catalog. But today, a true taxonomy of how we have become doesn't exist. Who or what is our future clinging to? Federica Belli asks precisely this question.

Once again, Heidegger comes to mind, but turned upside down: there is no longer a God who can save us because we are God...divinities, architects of a destiny more or less mixed with technologies or steroids of all kinds, which makes human life itself dysphoric. 

Federica Belli, in a journey that starts from books (by Paul Preciado, Mark Fisher, Gabriel Orozco and my own) transformed into a force of the contemporary, turns a well-known problem upside down: monsters are the only normal inhabitants of the path of human existence.

All this, yet denied by those who stigmatize a Queer present, has aesthetic and ethical implications: where is the line between right and wrong? What can we save from moral articulation?

They say that young people try to destroy social media algorithms through shit-posting. No ethics nor coherent information, only images that alternate meaningless narratives with a moral laxity that is yet to be measured. There is more truth in the feed of the eighteen-year-old's Instagram than on the headlines of most newspapers.

In Belli's artistic project Accidentally Found Out —that exists virtually on the internet and reified as an exhibition at the gallery ALMANAQUE-fotográfica curated by its founder Arturo Delgado— we observe a mutation of what could previously be easily defined in binary terms: human vs. animal, male vs. female, right vs. wrong, dangerous vs. harmless… These staged photos of certain individual and peculiar lives show the dysphoric conflicts that we all face.

Homo Sapiens are shaping their own den: there will be hominids after the explosion, but they will not have the form of automata. They would rather be animals, among other animals. Diverse with no categories: they, like clouds, are simply in the world.

Leonardo Caffo. 

Professor of Art and Philosophy, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milano.

Federica Belli (Millesimo, Italy. 1998). In 2021 while studying to graduate as an Economist from Bocconi University in Milan, Belli won the SKY Arts Master of Photography competition which allowed her to work first as an assistant to leading artists Oliviero Toscani at Fabrica and Chris Buck, and then as photo editor at Musée Magazine.

Afterwards Belli was invited as a TEDx Talks speaker, becoming the photographer for Ferrari Drivers' Academy in Maranello. In just a couple of years her work has been exhibited at Paris Photo, Photo London, MIA Photo Fair and The Phair by Galleria Valeria Bella, at the Digital Art Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022 and at Photographers! at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence, curated by Walter Guadagnini. In 2021 Belli won the BNP-Paribas Photography Award.

Since 2023, Belli lives in Paris where, after studying at the École du Louvre, she is producing her first book published byPostcart.

ALMANAQUE-fotográfica is proud to present her first solo exhibition in autumn 2024 and a selection at Zona Maco 2025.