From 14th June to 25th September 2024, the Spazio Extra of the MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome is hosting Nuove avventure sotterranee, an exhibition curated by Alessandro Dandini de Sylva that brings together shots by Stefano Graziani, Rachele Maistrello, Domingo Milella, Luca Nostri and Giulia Parlato. Ghella – Italy’s oldest large infrastructure company – thus commissions one of the most interesting authors of contemporary Italian photography with a new photographic campaign for the Roman museum.
Alessandro Giuli, President of the Fondazione MAXXI: “We are delighted to welcome Ghella’s enlightening photographic commissioning project back to MAXXI, the result of an ambitious and courageous vision that sees culture as an important instrument of institutional growth.
Nuove avventure sotterranee represents a further stage in the long-term relationship between MAXXI and Ghella, crowned by the generous donation of 48 photographic works that have become part of the Museum’s Collections: a virtuous example of an alliance between the public and private sectors aimed at supporting creativity”.
“New Underground Adventures”, explains Federico Ghella, Vice President of Ghella, “is the second chapter of a project that aims to tell our reality through the free gaze of a group of Italian artists. This cultural investment has allowed us to export culture, as well as our engineering expertise, to the world and has redesigned Ghella’s entire imagery. Leafing through the images in this collection I realise how much beauty can be hidden in our daily adventures”.
For New Underground Adventures, the five chosen photographers freely documented the birth of great works in Italy, Canada, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand. The exhibition includes over one hundred images: those of the artists who observed and interpreted the infrastructures, leaving a ‘poetic distance’ between the construction sites and their representation, and those from Ghella’s archives, documenting infrastructures built between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 2000s. In this way, the difference, which lies entirely in the language, of the two photographic corpuses becomes clear: while in those from the archives, taken by engineers and technicians, a certain unconscious aesthetic can be recognised, in those by Graziani, Maistrello, Milella, Nostri and Parlato, observation is the starting point for a series of reflections on the clichés of representation, on the ambiguity of the photographic document, on excavation as a reading of intangible aspects of the landscape, on the symbolism of the cave, on abstraction and much more.
Between views of construction sites and cities alternating with fossil remains or mechanical components, tropical plants and rocky landscapes, workers at work and nocturnal animals, the distance the authors have left between them and the infrastructure is the space of research, the context in which to reconsider and regenerate the imaginary of corporate photography, glimpsing new possibilities for storytelling.
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