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We are pleased to announce that The Lilies Pond by Alma Bibolotti is the winning project of Collectible Shots – A Journey Beyond the Visible, the open call exclusive to members of Exhibit Around APS held in collaboration with the Passage Arte Contemporanea gallery in Trieste.
Collectible Shots was created to support photographers in their professional path, offering them the opportunity to exhibit and sell their work in a gallery. The final selection was entrusted to a jury made up of Peter Iancovich (director and co-founder of Passage Arte Contemporanea gallery), Alessandra Spigai (artist and co-founder of Passage Arte Contemporanea gallery), Alessandra Calò (photographer), Fabrizio Cicconi (photographer), Annalisa Foti (art dealer), and Daniele Berto (poet).
The Lilies Pond by Alma Bibolotti is a project born from her fascination with Claude Monet’s Nymphéas and from observing water lily ponds as a world of secret alchemies. Influenced by Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetics, Bibolotti turns her attention to transient, imperfect beauty: her images reject sharp focus, favouring light that carves natural elements and turns them into metaphors for a liminal zone. Water reflections dissolve the surface into flow, tracing patterns and curves in what she describes as a kind of blue dance. The result is a progression from representation to abstraction, where soft tones and cold colours blur and fade the shapes, lending the scenes a surreal quality that deepens their melancholic mood and heightens the dreamlike, ethereal aura of leaves and flowers, evoking the rarefaction and nostalgia of a “floating world.”
The Lilies Pond by Alma Bibolotti will be exhibited at Passage Arte Contemporanea during Trieste Photo Days 2026 (October 22-25), in dialogue with A/R Acqua e Ruggine by Giulia Natalia Comito, already a winner of the 2025 Portfolio Reviews, and with Alessandra Spigai’s sculptures from the series Le muse interiori.
We are also pleased to award two honourable mentions:
The Time Dreamed by Umberto Verdoliva is a project born from the distance between the time lived and the time longed for. Through transitional places, temporary rooms, and nights lit by artificial light, the author searches for a form of permanence that daily life does not allow: family, affection, and simple gestures are not absences, but fragile, intermittent presences that fully exist only when he is able to stop and truly look at them. The passing landscape, blurred faces, and lights in the fog belong to an uncertain time, suspended between reality and imagination: not the time he lives, but the one he desires, holds onto, sometimes only brushes against. Verdoliva has long pursued a path in humanist photography and was named FIAF Author of the Year in Caorle in 2023.
Heim by Markus Born is a long-term photographic project made while living in and travelling through Germany. The selection presented, nineteen black-and-white photographs, is a considered excerpt from a larger body of work, also intended for a book project planned for 2027. With an approach that combines documentary rigour and compositional research, Born leaves room for chance, building an associative panorama that is dark, attentive, and unsettled, touching on themes such as historical memory, migration, and the relationship with nature. The title itself, “heim,” stops just short of “Heimat” (homeland, belonging), gesturing towards a return that never fully arrives.
