Biography

Marzio Emilio Villa is an Afro-descendant artist born in Brazil in 1987, lives and works in Milan.
His visual research focuses on social disparities, investigating discriminatory realities and European and international social structures. Through his works, he dedicates himself to sociological introspection on themes that start from colonialism, from the reminiscences present in the architectural celebration of monuments, from urban planning in relation to social disparities, from ethics in the photographic process, paying attention to the effects of civilization and its structural complexities, with empathy towards collective and individual identities. Since 2012 he has exhibited recurrently at the Parisian gallery Myriam Bouagal Galerie. In 2016 he became an author within the Heillandi Gallery. In 2017 he joined the international collective Hans Lucas. In 2019, his project “La marée de la mémoire” was exhibited by Leica Galerie in Paris. In 2020 he actively collaborates with the Wall Street Journal newspaper. In 2021, he donated his work “Kahnawá:ke, native sacred land occupied” to the Lia Museum in La Spezia, exhibited next to a capriccio by Canaletto. At the end of 2021 he co-founded usthey NARRATIVE, a collective created to represent photographers who are part of minorities. Also in the same year, his work “Privileges” became part of the permanent collection of the MUDEC in Milan.