Holding On by Michele Zousmer wins the ninth Trieste Civic Museums Award
Since 2017, the partnership between URBAN Photo Awards and the Museums and Libraries Service of the Municipality of Trieste has resulted in a solo exhibition at one of the city’s leading museum venues.
The winner of the ninth Trieste Civic Museums Award is Holding On by Michele Zousmer, an ongoing project about the solitude of elderly women in Romania and Bulgaria.
The selection was made by Claudia Colecchia, senior archivist and head of the Photographic Archive and Library at the Municipality of Trieste’s Civic Museums of History and Art, and by Michela Messina, curator of the Civic Museums of History and Art and of the Sartorio Civic Museum, who explained their choice as follows:
The selection of HOLDING ON reflects the project’s relevance to questions of memory, ageing and the intergenerational transmission of intangible cultural heritage. In a body of photographic research that is consistent in both formal and documentary terms, Michele Zousmer explores the relationship between individual experience, family memory and the way a community changes over time.
The project is of particular interest for its ability to combine the documentary dimension of photography with a reflection on how memory is constructed and preserved. The images do more than record the circumstances of their subjects: they convey the relationship between people, objects, photographs and places as the means by which the past is kept, reworked and passed on.
Seen in this light, the women portrayed can be considered the custodians of an intangible heritage of memories, practices, knowledge, traditions and family narratives, whose transmission is now at risk of being lost. The work therefore also serves to document and preserve social memory, addressing loss not solely in individual terms but as a process that affects the cultural continuity of entire communities.
HOLDING ON is especially pertinent to the Sartorio Civic Museum, given the striking correspondence between the subject of the project and the nature of the venue itself, which preserves the memory of the family who lived there and, through its rooms, collections, objects and surviving records, makes a memory that was originally private and domestic accessible to the public.
In this sense, Zousmer’s project can enter into direct dialogue with the museum. On one hand, photography documents family memory at the very moment it risks being lost; on the other, the institution embodies the process by which a private memory is preserved, historicised and turned into shared heritage. HOLDING ON thus invites us to consider the museum itself as an apparatus for preserving and transmitting memory, bringing the intimate world of the family archive into relation with the public world of cultural heritage.
The project will be on display from 23 October to 8 November 2026 at the Sartorio Civic Museum, in dialogue with the museum’s collection of ceramics, books and paintings, and Zousmer will receive her award in Trieste at the URBAN Photo Awards ceremony on Saturday 24 October 2026, during the 13th edition of Trieste Photo Days.
About the project: Holding On
In Holding On, photography becomes a means of looking closely at a condition that is at once intimate and collective. The portraits show bodies marked by time, everyday gestures and domestic settings, building a narrative suspended between memory, endurance and vulnerability. These women, often left alone after the death of a husband and the departure of children in search of work elsewhere, are the keepers of a family memory and of a cultural heritage that is gradually disappearing.
Zousmer’s eye never exploits fragility, focusing instead on the dignity and tenacity of her subjects, women in their eighties and nineties who carry on with the business of the day. Yet behind that strength lies a wider reality: many of them live in isolated areas, with no social networks, family support or state provision.
The project turns the individual portrait into a universal reflection on solitude, memory and our collective responsibility towards old age, in societies that are ageing fast and cannot afford to ignore what is happening.
The photographer: Michele Zousmer
Michele Zousmer is an American humanitarian photographer whose work places human experience at its centre. Her images seek out fleeting moments of grace and beauty in lives marked by profound hardship, and give a voice to individuals and communities often pushed to the margins of society. Through her lens Zousmer becomes a storyteller, an advocate and a vessel for change, inviting viewers to follow with her the threads that bind our lives to one another. Her work is a testament to the transformative power of photography.
In 2025 Zousmer won the TPD Best Author Edilimpianti Innovation Partner Award with MIS[S]UNDERSTOOD, a project devoted to the women of the Irish Traveller community.
Website: michelezousmer.com
