Location: Photo Club Split (Marmontova 5)

Dates: November 14 – December 9, 2025

On Friday, November 14 at 7 p.m., the exhibition of finalists of the international photography competition “HERITAGE” will mark the opening of the fifth edition of the SPLIT FORMAT photography festival.

This year’s theme of the competition, as well as the overarching theme of Split Format, is heritage. The professional jury – Bella Rupena (curator and art historian, head of the Tošo Dabac (Archive), Světlana Malin (curator and artistic director of the Fotograf Zone festival in Prague), Cosimo Pastore (Italian photographer and visual artist), Eleni Albarosa (Italian photographer and anthropologist), and Ana Žanko (president of Photo Club Split, president of the jury, curator and art historian) – evaluated 38 submissions from five countries around the world.

The uniqueness of this competition lies in the fact that photographers submit series of 10 to 15 conceptually developed photographs, which must be cohesive and communicate the theme through visual storytelling. In other words, the competition seeks the ability to tell a story through the medium of photography.

Among the strong international competition, the following artists stood out and reached the final:

• Alice Zorzin (Italy), with her deeply meditative series Everything Begins with a Rain of Needles, a reflection on a vanishing landscape and the ecological and identity loss that gives rise to new forms of belonging;
   
• Ilias Kleftaras (Greece), whose series portrays the village of Olympos on the Greek island of Karpathos, exploring how living traditions, rituals, and collective memories shape the contemporary identity of the community;
   
• Marijo Maduna and Marin Margeta, both members of Photo Club Mostar. Margeta, who won second prize at last year’s festival, returns with a new documentary series, while Maduna presents Silent Testimonies of the Sea — a technically and visually striking underwater series depicting Adriatic shipwrecks that have become part of a living marine ecosystem.
   
• Margeta’s series explores heritage through the life of the Roma community and market day, emphasizing that the Roma are true inheritors of the world’s culture — keepers of memory, rhythm, and movement, reminding us that the world itself is a great journey. Their heritage is their relationship with the world – freedom of movement, deep respect for nature, and the art of creating much from little.
   
• The final selected artist is Rajan Milošević from Labin, with his minimalist, almost abstract series Hammers. Through sharp shadows and graphic composition, he documents the Monument to the Miner-Fighter (created by Quintino Bassani and Berislav Iskra in the 1980s), which commemorates the mining heritage and working-class history of the city. The monument’s structures, defined by harsh contrasts, evoke both the rawness and unpredictability of a freshly mined piece of coal.

More information about the exhibition is available at: https://fotoklubsplit.hr/