With a background as a semi-professional basketball player, Marcello Coslovi (1992) is a visual artist based between Modena, Milan, and Hà Nội (Việt Nam). After earning a degree in Law from UNIMORE, he studied contemporary photography at Spazio Labo’ in Bologna, where he graduated in 2021 and went on to work as a teaching assistant for the following two years.
Human rights and social justice form the common thread connecting his legal education with his artistic practice. His longstanding engagement with basketball, particularly as a point guard, has been equally formative for his artistic practice, fostering a collaborative way of thinking and a lasting interest in the expressive and relational potential of bodies in space, through which movement conveys emotion, tension, and meaning.

Coslovi develops long-term interdisciplinary projects, working primarily through photography. His work, informed by postcolonial thought, investigates identity, belonging, discrimination, vulnerability, and structural marginalisation, while critically interrogating his own situated position as a photographer and as a white Western man whose work moves across both the Global North and the Global South.
For Coslovi, photography is above all a relational practice, capable of creating encounters across different cultural backgrounds and lived experiences while fostering spaces where dominant narratives can be questioned, new forms of relation can emerge, and the visible and invisible boundaries that continue to shape contemporary societies through migration and the enduring legacies of colonialism can be challenged.
Many of these concerns are rooted in his family history, particularly in the experience of his paternal grandfather, an Istrian refugee who was forced to leave his home and his mother behind to rebuild his life on his own in Italy.

Grounded in an intercultural perspective, his practice moves between documentary and staged photography and is characterised by a collaborative approach developed with the people he photographs throughout the creative process. Collaboration extends beyond the moment of image-making: performance often creates space for participants to exercise their own agency in shaping the photographs, while the project's later stages invite them to actively contribute to the production of meaning through their own perspectives and interpretations. This approach leads him to challenge the traditional divide between photographer and participant, questioning the power relations embedded within the photographic medium and exploring the space between truth and fiction.
Informed in particular by Édouard Glissant's concept of "Relation" and Trinh T. Minh-ha's notion of "speaking nearby" rather than speaking for, he places the act of listening at the centre of the photographic encounter. In approaching the Other (in Glissant's sense of irreducible alterity), he embraces the impossibility of complete understanding, recognising opacity not as a limit to be overcome but as the very condition of an ethical encounter. Yet he also believes that proximity and relation possess a transformative potential: the identities of both the photographer and the people he photographs are continually reshaped through the relationship itself.

His work has been exhibited in national and international institutions and festivals including Fotografia Europea (Reggio Emilia), Fondazione Francesco Fabbri (Treviso), Gibellina Photoroad Open Air & Site-specific Festival, Circulation(s) Festival (Paris), Hôtel Fontfreyde (Clermont-Ferrand), and the Biennale internationale des Rencontres Photographiques de Guyane (Cayenne).
With his personal project The Wrong Side of the Tracks, he was a finalist in Giovane Fotografia Italiana #09 (2022) and shortlisted for the Kassel Dummy Award 2022. In 2023, he was one of the winning artists of the Circulation(s) Festival in Paris and a finalist for the PhMuseum Photography Grant in the "Main Prize" category.

Since 2023, he is co-founder and lecturer at Sugar Paper, a cultural space dedicated to promoting and disseminating contemporary photography through the photobook. In an era dominated by digital overconsumption and the accelerated rhythms of contemporary capitalism, Marcello Coslovi sees the photobook as a powerful tool to enforce a slowdown: a tactile experience that invites us to decelerate and rediscover the transformative value of slowness. In his view, it is also an ideal medium for creating spaces for intercultural dialogue, where multiple perspectives can coexist and hegemonic narratives may be questioned, unsettled, and reimagined.

Since becoming co-artistic director of the GU.PHO. Festival in 2025, his curatorial research has increasingly focused on counter-archival practices that foreground narratives historically silenced or excluded by dominant histories. This ongoing engagement has profoundly influenced his own artistic practice, leading him to increasingly integrate vernacular photographic materials into his projects as a means of activating counter-archives, while reinforcing an approach grounded in what Tina Campt describes as "listening to images."

Since 2025, he has been collaborating as a visual artist with the Documentation Center of CRID (Interdepartmental Research Center on Discriminations and Vulnerabilities) at the Department of Law.

He is also an external collaborator at the G.B. Martini Conservatory in Bologna, where he contributes as a visual artist. This ongoing collaboration has further expanded his artistic research, fostering a growing interest in the dialogue between sound and image.

---

2023

Winner of the 2023 “Call for Projects” Gibellina Photoroad Open Air & Site-specific Festival;


Finalist for the “Main Prize” PhMuseum 2023 Photography Grant;


Artist at the 2023 Circulation(s) Festival;

2022

Finalist of the 11th Edition of the Premio Francesco Fabbri per le Arti Contemporanee - “Contemporary Photography” section;


Finalist of Giovane Fotografia Italiana #09;


Finalist of the Kassel Dummy Award 2022;

2021

Finalist for the “Main Prize” Gomma Photography Grant 2021;


Finalist of the Marco Pesaresi Award 2021;


“Best Overall Portfolio,” Fotografia Europea 2021;


GUP Fresh Eyes 2021 Talent;

---

MAGAZINES

Il Fotografo, no. 358 (print edition) — February 2026, How to Take One Photo, edited by Raffaele Vertaldi;

L’Essenziale Studio, Vol.06 – October 2023, Focus on Marcello Coslovi, The Wrong Side of the Tracks by Laura De Marco;


        ONLINE PUBLICATIONS

Photoworks/Photography+ Street #16, “The Role of Abstraction in Documentary Street Photography”, written by Ricardo Reverón Blanco (August 2022);

---

2025

Guest lecture at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Artist talk for the third-year program at Spazio Labo’

2024

Two-day workshop at the Polo del ’900 in Turin on exhibition design and editorial planning.

Guest workshop at the G.B. Martini Conservatory in Bologna

---

2025

“Alterazioni” is a group exhibition curated by Melissa Pallini and hosted by Fondazione Orestiadi for the fifth edition of the Gibellina Photoroad – Open Air & Site-specific Festival.

2024

“Davide Degano and Marcello Coslovi: Romanzo Meticcio and The Wrong Side of the Tracks” — an exhibition at the Polo del ’900 curated by Chiara Capodici, dedicated to the work of the two artists. The exhibition brings into dialogue the images from the artists’ projects and the working materials produced during two workshops: one on exhibition design and the other on editorial planning, conducted by the artists themselves and Chiara Capodici;


Slideshow of The Wrong Side of the Tracks accompanied by a live performance by nine students from the Electronic Music School of the “G.B. Martini” Conservatory in Bologna, as part of “Suono Domenica - Dodici ore di musica di ricerca”;

2023

8th edition of the Biennale Internationale des Rencontres Photographiques de Guyane, in the exhibition “Hors-champ(s)” curated by Nicola Lo Calzo, Cayenne, French Guiana;


13th edition of the Circulation(s) Festival, Le CENTQUATRE-PARIS;
“Offsite exhibition” of the festival at Hôtel Fontfreyde, Clermont-Ferrand;
“Exhibition outside the walls” in three Paris metro stations;

2022

11th Edition of the Francesco Fabbri Prize for Contemporary Arts – “Contemporary Photography” section, Treviso;


“Spazio Portici – Percorsi Creativi”, 4th Episode, in the “Generazione Italia” section curated by Kublaiklan, Turin;


“Possibile” – Group exhibition of Giovane Fotografia Italiana #09, curated by Ilaria Campioli and Daniele De Luigi, as part of the Festival of Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia;

2021

“Se non ora, ora” – Final group exhibition of the Biennial Course at Spazio Labo’, Bologna;