Some recognitions arrive quietly — as a line in an official list, not a trophy handed across a stage. That's how this one arrived. The European Union delegation confirmed the selection for Europe Week 2026: 267 submissions from across the continent, narrowed to ten performances. One of them is Terminal: Vini Re, Vini Re! — a project I'm proud to be part of, as a member of its creative team.
I want to be precise about what this is, because precision matters to me more than a bigger headline would. This is a selection, not an award. I don't call it “Europe Week Winner,” because that isn't what it is, and because the accurate version is, if anything, the more interesting one: Europe, at a continental scale, made room for ten ideas out of 267 — and this was one of them.
The arithmetic of being chosen
Ten out of 267 is a little under four percent. That number is worth sitting with. It says nothing about talent in isolation — juries select for fit, timing, relevance to a theme, a dozen things no artist controls — but it says something about the field: hundreds of proposals from across Europe, competing for ten slots, in a year when European institutions are visibly narrowing their attention toward work that says something about memory, place and who gets to be seen.
What "Terminal" holds
A terminal is where journeys end and where they're supposed to begin again — a structure built for movement that, abandoned, becomes a monument to the movement that stopped. Vini Re, Vini Re! — “pay attention, pay attention” — is not a neutral title. It's an address to whoever is still listening. The specific staging and the rest of the creative team behind Terminal will be credited here in full once the production materials are cleared for publication.
Where I fit into it
My own practice sits at the intersection of photography and direction — building images that hold a place and the people in it, rather than just documenting them. The exact shape of my contribution to Terminal, whether that's photography, visual direction, or both, is something I'll detail here once it's formally confirmed by the production. What I can say now is that being asked onto a team selected at this level is itself a marker: the work I've built since 2017, mostly in fashion and portrait photography, has started to read as relevant outside the frame it was made in.
Why this belongs in the Journal, not just a headline
It would be easy to reduce this to a single sentence for a homepage banner. I'd rather use it the way it deserves — as an entry point into a larger story about where the work is heading: from fashion sets and wedding days into cultural production at a European scale, without leaving the first two behind.
More on Terminal — the performance, the site, the rest of the team — will follow here as the project becomes public. For now: selected, not crowned, and glad to be one of the ten.
