
Selection committee
For each edition of the Prize, the Board of the Foundation relies on a group of four selectors chosen from among the most authoritative experts in the critical and editorial fields of the Italian contemporary art scene. They will be asked to identify 12 unpublished projects by as many Italian artists or collectives, and will subsequently participate in the jury together with the representatives of the Foundation and the partner institutions of the Prize — one for each body. For the 2023 edition they are Caterina Avataneo, Lorenzo Gigotti, Elisa Medde e Valentina Tanni.
Jury
The jury includes the members of the selection committee – Caterina Avataneo, Lorenzo Gigotti, Elisa Medde e Valentina Tanni – together with members of the Foundation and of the partnering institutions, one for each organization. For the 2023 editions they are Sara Dolfi Agostini, curator of the Paul Thorel Foundation, Antonio Carloni, vice director of the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, and Luigi Fassi director of Artissima. Per questa edizione sono Sara Dolfi Agostini, curatrice della Fondazione Paul Thorel, Antonio Carloni, vice direttore delle Gallerie d’Italia a Torino, e Luigi Fassi direttore di Artissima.
Winners
The winners of the first edition of the Prize are Clusterduck (a collective of five Italian-German artists born in the 80s, who live between Florence, Milan and Berlin), Jim C Nedd (Verona, 1991; lives and works in Milan) and Lina Pallotta (San Salvatore Telesino, 1955; lives and works in Rome).
The creative approach to the production of images of the three winning artists is very different, varied and expresses the potential of an institution that seeks to carry out research on the photographic media today, following the footsteps of Paul Thorel.
From the reflection on new technologies, methods of collective appropriation and authorship in Clusterduck, we turn to depicting the body in its performance – individual and social – in the shots of Jim C Nedd, culminating in the photographic testimony of Lina Pallotta’s poetic and militant alliance with the Neapolitan transsexual community.
In their work, the city of Naples will emerge as a tool for survey, vision and stage, and Paul Thorel’s study will be reactivated and used to its full potential.

Clusterduck is an interdisciplinary collective working in the fields of new media studies, design and transmedia, investigating processes and actors behind the creation of Internet-based content. Clusterduck is currently developing Meme Manifesto, a transmedia project that collectively explores the occult meanings and communicative potentials of memetic symbology. During the last 4 years Clusterduck also created the participative exhibitions #MEMEPROPAGANDA and #MEMERSFORFUTURE, investigating the role of memetics in post-truth times and in the global climate justice movement. Clusterduck works have been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Villa Arson Nice, The Influencers, Werkleitz Festival, Impakt Festival, re:publica, Arebyte, Greencube Gallery, Tentacular Festival, IFFR, Radical Networks.
According to the Selection Committee: “Clusterduck is an interdisciplinary artistic collective working at the crossroads between research, design and transmedia, with an attention towards subcultures, aesthetic movements and the political implications generated by the network. Clusterduck’s research and artistic production underpins the full redefinition of the status of the image, its symbolic value and its new narrative potential, and how it is generated, presented, distributed, enjoyed, acquired and valued in the light of the mass adoption of network technologies.”

Jim C. Nedd is the founder of the Primitive Art experimental group together with Matteo Pit. Nedd is a photographer and director in advertising and editorial projects, and is part of the Toilet Paper Collective. His work was exposed to the Cinemateca Distrital, Bogota; Autoitalia, London; Damien & The Love Guru, CFA, Milan; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Liverpool Bienniale; Sandy Brown, Berlin. His work was published in Aperture, Vogue Italia, Kaleidoscope and RivistaStudio. Since 2019, he has been a UNICEF collaborator and has collaborated in reporting in Sicily, Beirut and the border with Syria.
According to the Selection Committee: ‘Jim C. Nedd makes digital photography, together with music, his main expressive language in both the arts and the commercial sphere. His photos are able to build bridges between different scales, connecting distant geographies, ecstatic festivecrowds and personal life episodes, as well as documentary and imagined reality. Popular culture and oral stories, handed down but not attested, often become the filter through which to put forward a critical look at society, and in particular on the representation of the body.”

Lina Pallotta is a photographer and lecturer. Trained at the International Center of Photography in New York (ICP), she published for various national and international journals, worked for the Impact Visuals Agency in New York and the Grazia Neri Agency in Milan. she had numerous personal and collective exhibitions in Europe and America, including the Queens Museum of Art in New York and L’Atelier de Visu in Marseille. She received the Catalogue Project 1998 award from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
According to the Selection Committee: ‘Lina Pallotta is an author who uses photography to tell and give visibility to stories and lives of marginalised individuals who are discriminated against and excluded from society and from the general media story. Her main focus has been transsexuals/transgender, working women, poets and underground artists through the photographic medium as both a detective and emancipatory tool. Trained at the International Center of Photography in New York (ICP) in photojournalism and documentary photography in the late 80s, her work depicts subjects intimately and poetically. Without rhetoric, we could say that her vision is ‘involved’ and ‘militant’.” .
Calendar
October 2022
The Paul Thorel Foundation announces the selection committee and jury for the 2023 edition of the prize
November – December 2022
The selection committee 2023 invited 12 artists to present an artistic project for the Paul Thorel Prize
January 2023
The jury announces the three winning artists
April – September 2023
The artists produce their project during the residency at Paul Thorel’s studio in Naples
February – March 2024
The Foundation presents the catalogue and the exhibition of the winning artists