Börje Tobiasson
Tingsas, 1952Lives and works everywhere
Born in Tingsas (Sweden) in 1952 and moved to Italy in the late 80s, Börje Tobiasson tells through his photographs a life of travel and nomadism. His shots show lives and places at the edge that are a metaphor for Tobiasson’s life. Tobiasson embraces the Buddhist discipline and makes nomadism a radical choice of life by deciding not to have a permanent home about twenty years ago.
His shots are always places of transit, and many of them connoted by political and geographical indefiniteness, often of conflicts: Albania, Gaza, Egypt, Palestine. And if there is no war, the limit and the transition are often in the transition from communist to democratic regime of the late 80s.
His snapshots always hide some touching details, as Denis Curti, author of the text in the catalogue of the exhibition "How to reach you" held at the De Chirico gallery in 2012 and who invited Tobiasson to Turin to participate in the IX BIENNALE DI FOTOGRAFIA: "In Börje’s work you can pick up nuances, details, glimpses of feelings, nostalgia, emotion, and above all, great respect for what is described. No complaint, no statement of opinion, no enchantment. It prevails a silent point of view, noble and calm, without appearing distant and arrogant... The rhythm is marked by the alternation of small facts, of glances that cross, of gestures laden with the sense of the past. In other words, a non-linear narrative, staggered and strongly imbued with awareness of the drama of human events."
For the BNL Prize it was selected a 1986 shot in Mexico City.
The year of realization of the shot is not random. 1986 is the year of the football World Cup in Mexico, the year when Diego Maradona takes Argentina by the hand and leads it to victory. The years when Mexican cinema begins to produce the feature films of the flourishing film industry that gives so much to Mexico in these years. In the shot of Tobiasson are already present the boys of "y tu mama también" by Alfonso Cuarón and the energy of Amores Perros by Inarritu. The street, the violence and the ransom of an entire country.