VIA DELLA FORNACE 41 50125 FIRENZE
Lorella Zanardo
Nuovi Occhi per i Media
“With this project, we are promoting a journey into faces and their meaning. Conformism has taken hold through apps, social media, digital humans, and even through mass cosmetic surgery inspired by the beauty standards spread on social networks. In the face of this increasingly widespread phenomenon, many questions arise: do we still recognize ourselves when we look in the mirror? Are our faces disappearing? What are we hiding when we present our altered and disguised faces? Volto Manifesto, which we are carrying forward with Unicoop Firenze, is a reflection on who we are and how we are changing. Because the face is not only the place of aesthetics, but also of ethics. The face is a heritage of humanity.”
Claudio Vanni
Head of External Relations, Unicoop Firenze
“This campaign launches a powerful and timely reflection on who we are and how we are changing. At Unicoop Firenze, we embraced this project by involving institutions, our members, citizens, and students, because we believe that everyone’s diversity and uniqueness must be protected as a value that contributes to building the ethical wealth of society. We are very happy with the support of the Tuscany Region and with the collaboration of Rifugio Digitale and Forma Edizioni, who have hosted the exhibition in this stimulating and innovative space within the city’s cultural scene.”
Volto Manifesto
22.09 – 24.09
Volto Manifesto was the result of a digital installation made up of videos and photographs of real, authentic faces — unretouched, portrayed in their genuine uniqueness.
The initiative was conceived by Lorella Zanardo and Cesare Cantù, founders of Nuovi Occhi per i Media (“New Eyes for the Media”).
Over the past year, around the Manifesto Faceproject, a wide-ranging awareness and promotional campaign has developed, supported by Unicoop Firenze through educational, cultural, and outreach initiatives. The program involved 50 classes and 1,000 students from Tuscany, Coop member sections, photography clubs, and photography schools, curated by… Paolo Cagnacci and Chiara Ruberti, proposing a deep reflection on the ethics of the face. The results of this widespread research have been collected in the first online core of an “Archive of the Face” — a repository of multimedia materials designed to create a profound and original visual foundation for reflection on the role of the human face. This ongoing work represents the first step toward the creation of a future Archive of the Face, with the long-term goal of recognizing the human face as a UNESCO heritage. The Volto Manifesto Project
After exploring the media’s use of women’s bodies in the research that culminated in the documentary Il corpo delle donne (The Body of Women), Lorella Zanardo has now turned her attention, with Manifesto Face, to what most distinctly differentiates us from one another — the face. “What will become of the human face? The one that naturally has its own features and imperfections, wrinkles and spots, the one that changes a little every day.”
This is the question that Lorella Zanardo and Cesare Cantù, activist founders of Nuovi Occhi per i Media and authors of the Manifesto Face awareness campaign, have posed. The initiative seeks to celebrate the uniqueness of the human face in contrast to the standardization of physical traits that is increasingly affecting people of all ages around the world. A scientific and cultural project by Nuovi Occhi per i Media, supported by Unicoop Firenze, Manifesto Face aims to raise awareness about the importance of preserving the uniqueness of the human face.
The rise of social media and new digital tools has triggered a widespread tendency to alter one’s facial appearance to resemble standardized and repetitive aesthetic ideals. 
