BARBARA GUSSONI
Contemporary Photography
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Biography
Barbara Gussoni is an Italian-Senegalese contemporary photographic artist and art therapist based in Marseille, France. Her work explores memory, identity, feminism, migration and social inclusion through portraiture, documentary photography and participatory artistic projects.
She began her career in the late 1990s in Brescia (Italy), working as an assistant to advertising photographer Rinaldo Capra and as a photo reporter for the A2 agency. During this period she attended the photography course at the Ken Damy Museum and took part in the project “Alzheimer, conoscere chi non ricorda”, the first multimedia exhibition in Italy dedicated to Alzheimer’s disease, combining photography and poetic texts.
After several years devoted to writing, she returned to photography in 2018 while training in contemporary art therapy in Arles, the city of the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival. This experience renewed her relationship with the camera and led to the publication of her first portfolio, “The Places of Meetings”, in 2019 in the online magazine L’Oeil de la Photographie.
Her personal projects often explore intimate and social themes:
Amore, a visual reflection on her father's illness and death;
We Should All Be Feminists, a feminist series portraying Barbies embodying women who played a role in the history of women’s emancipation;
13 Men of Cleaning, a photographic project inviting men to pose nude while cleaning their homes.
Her work also develops through participatory and socially engaged photography.
In 2020–2021 she created A Day in the Life of…, a project carried out with children with multiple disabilities and their families in a specialised centre in Marseille.
In 2023–2024 she collaborated with CNRS and La Fabrique des écritures in Marseille on the exhibition “Treating the Pandemic”, combining photography and sound recordings to portray hospital carers with foreign qualifications and recount their migratory journeys and professional experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic in southern France.
Since 2018 she has also collaborated with the theatre association Gruppo Elettrogeno Teatro in Bologna. Her photographic project “How Theatre Breaks into Everyday Life”, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, integrates photography into the dramaturgical process and culminates in the performance CreaturÉ™, premiered at TPO Bologna in December 2024.
Since October 2025 she represents the Picks Agency in Europe.
Barbara Gussoni is a member of Les Hang’Art, a collective of French-speaking artists.
Her work engages with feminism, gender issues, migration and inclusive arts, and she is particularly committed to artistic projects that promote the inclusion of people with disabilities.