Darkelrafi is Raffaele Sperandeo, born in Naples and living in Milan after a long time living in England and Germany. After a life in marketing, his passion for photography began in 2020 as an inner journey made of darkness, chemistry and love. “If we really wanted to look for a common thread among Raffaele's shots, trying to define his poetics, then we would have to lay on the canvas magical landscapes and portraits, dreamlike visions and macroscopic images of flowers, because all of these investigate and suggest his 'emotional geographies.' There is no straight line connecting departure and destination, but rather an intersection of different worlds: feminine beauty, the passage of time, the wonder of a primitive world, and, finally, home to finally find peace.''

Born in Augusta in 1993. He attended the three-year course in Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania, the city where he currently lives and works. Starting from an intense territorial investigation, he decided to use photography as a means of digital experimentation and conceptual research. Gabriele Argentino recounts moments of everyday life, bringing to light various themes such as: loneliness, stillness, absence. He pays attention and care to what is visible to every eye but that no one is interested in seeing.

Erika Allia was born in 1997 in Catania, where she currently lives and works. In 2022 she obtained a First Level Degree in Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania, where she is currently attending the two-year Photography course. In his artistic research, the self-portrait is the means with which to access hidden places of his own interiority and highly intimate environments. The predilection for the square format of her photographs alludes to a claustrophobic space within which she now moves delicately, now lies motionless, revealing herself in whole or in part, as if to highlight her desire to escape from mental spaces in which she does not recognise herself. Even when she does not appear explicitly in her work, Erika Allia focuses on details and atmospheres, stimulating deep reflection on human relationships and our understanding of intimacy in a chaotic world.

Born in Catania in 1995, he lives and works in Catania. He obtained the second level Diploma in Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania in December 2024. Part of his artistic research focuses on the investigation of mental illnesses through photography, portraying himself and his mother. Through photography he intends to break down the taboos that revolve around mental illnesses and make them a more accessible topic, but above all to highlight the sensitivity of the matter. Another part of his research, at the moment, focuses on the representation of travel and nature, themes that are of vital importance to him. In 2023 he placed among the top twelve at the Ragusa Photo Festival, a national competition that sees the participation of students from various academies throughout Italy, entering the catalog with the project “Viaggio all’interno della psichiatria”.

Antonino Cuccia, class 1999,is a photographer from Palermo and operates in this same city for his photographic production. After abandoning his studies in "Communication Sciences for Cultures and Arts", in 2022 he decided to devote himself entirely to photography, guided by the desire to communicate his personal emotions through the representation of dreamlike and introspective situations, halfway between surrealism and mysticism, which very often see the human presence immersed in scenarios that are both melancholic and solitary, as well as monumental. Thanks to the profound exploration of the relationship between the human being and the monumentality of nature, coined through studies on the concept of "Sublime" by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the environmental portrait is the main focus of his research.