Marina Mónaco is a photographer and film director from Buenos Aires, now based in Berlin. Since moving to Germany in 2020, she has explored the spectrum of youth subcultures, young love, and the local music scene—known as Neue Neue Deutsche Welle—across the country.
Before moving to Europe, she worked on a more innocent, colorful series called Kids - shot between 2019-2022. About a year after settling in Berlin, she found herself inspired by the late ’70s and early ’80s New Wave movement, and accidentally started her latest series, Neue Welle, in 2023, as a tribute to that era.
She began frequenting backstage areas, getting closer to the music scene, and developing a raw, high-contrast, black-and-white aesthetic. Somehow, the photos reflect how the city reshaped her perspective as a photographer.
Without understanding the German language, she used that distance as her own inspiration, reflecting it in her photos—a nostalgic, time-travel portal to a past that never existed.
Her work captures an era destined to become the nostalgia of the future. The cities that she has been exploring are Berlin, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Kölln, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, and small towns in the Netherlands like Horst, Venlo and Eindhoven. Marina's work has been showcased in solo exhibitions in Berlin and New York, and she has published two photo books, called “I saw you in a song” - with her latest presented at the 2024 New York Art Book Fair.
