La fotografia dei luoghi

From the 1980s onwards, photography experienced a deep transformation in its way of looking at the landscape, intending it no longer as just a picturesque background, or “something to be represented,” but as a living subject, ever-changing, and bearing historical, social and cultural layers. Those years mark the birth of what we know today as Scuola italiana di paesaggio (Italian school of landscape photography), an ensemble of artistic practices which interrogate man’s space, location, memory, presence—sometimes even absence—in relation to his surroundings.

Luigi Ghirri is the main protagonist of this landscape. The project Viaggio in Italia (1984), which Ghirri himself curated with critics Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and Gianni Celati, among others, marked an attempt at “re-founding” the image of the Italian landscape. No longer monuments, or touristic landmarks; what the photographers involved in the project (among many: Ghirri, Basilico, Guidi, Olivo Barbieri, Vittore Fossati, and Mario Cresci) explored are peripheral places: passageways, infrastructures, industrial areas, provincial roads, abandoned shores. The result is a real rendition of Italy, transformed, apart from the stereotype of classic Italian images.

These are the footsteps along which the artistic research of Alessandro Ruzzier (Trieste, 1967) follows. Ruzzier’s work investigates the correlations between man and landscape, and the various social, political and environmental forms they take. By using both narrative and documentary sources, Ruzzier combines on-site work with archival research, with the aim of redefining the apparent order of things into a new poetic and experiential relationship.

Alessandro Ruzzier, sound and visual artist.

Ciada Centazzo, art historian and independent curator.

Antonio Garlatti, general curator for Palinsesti Festival 2025 and director and conservator at the Museo Diocesano di Arte Sacra di Pordenone.

Giorgia Gastaldon, researcher in contemporary art history at Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata and former general curator of Palinsesti - Festival of contemporary art.