Deutsche Version
Versión en español
Version française
Versione italiana
The show
The rooms of the sixteenth-century CLOSTRIES OF SAN PIETRO will host ten exhibitions.
On the ground floor, to open the eyes of visitors, is an exhibition that captures the infinite mutability of clouds in a collective exhibition, entitled Sky Album. 150 years of capturing clouds curated by Luce Lebart and Michelle Wilson, celebrating the vastness and beauty of cloud images and the unique practice of photographing the sky by scientists, amateurs and artists. Over one hundred and fifty works tell this passion starting from the dawn of photography, from the French Gustave Le Gray to the Italian Mario Giacomelli, passing from the works of the American Edward Steichen up to the two contemporary artists called to create two installations, the Finnish Anna Ninskanen and the British Kalev Erickson.
On the first floor, Helen Sear's exhibition project, entitled Within Sight, presents a series of multiple, composite works that explore the dissolution of single-lens perspective associated with the camera lens. Sear is a careful observer of the changing elements that make up a landscape and conveys the experience of being present in nature, combining hand-drawn or erased elements with photography, in a conceptual work that has its roots in an interest in magical realism and surrealism.
Yvonne Venegas with Sea of Cortez traces an intergenerational story in balance between the experience of her family - who lived in the copper mines of Santa Rosalia, in Baja California, at the beginning of the twentieth century - and that of an entire generation who exploited the territories around the Sea of Cortez. His exploration makes use of the help of the people he meets along his path of investigation, to express the feeling of exploitation and the remains that those mining stories have sown on their path.
The Indian photographer Arko Datto brings to the attention of visitors the looming issue of climate catastrophe and the refugees it generates, through a photographic trilogy that has been ongoing for nine years. The two chapters presented here, taken from The Shunyo Raja Monographies project, are entirely dedicated to the territory of the Bengal Delta, considered one of the epicenters of change; include portraits and landscapes that map erosion and sea level rise across India and Bangladesh, and trace the trajectory of those displaced and landscapes lost to a nature that increasingly cries out for attention.
Following this, Matteo de Mayda, a Venetian photographer, exhibits at the Cloisters an installation made up of archive and reportage photos, satellite and microscope images, individual testimonies and scientific theories that are part of the There's no calm after the storm project, in which he investigates the long-term and less visible impacts of the Vaia storm, which hit the north-east of Italy at the end of 2018. Born after the end of the emergency, the project reflects on the fragile balance between human action and stability of ecosystems.
Jo Ractliffe's exhibition is entitled Landscaping and is entirely dedicated to the South African landscape taken during her car journeys along the south-west coast. In the black and white shots, Ractliffe reflects on the very concept of landscape, ignoring the term in an attempt to free his photographs from stereotyped conventions: talking about landscape in terms of beauty, or on the contrary ugliness, means observing rather than participating, reducing the place to a concept rather than a lived experience. With the term landscaping, the artist tries to convey the idea of landscape as something active, also capable of preserving the memory of the past.
In the large central corridor, Natalya Saprunova exhibits the Permafrost project which tells the story of the life of the populations of the far north of the Asian continent. Here, in her long travels in the company of her camera and a notebook, the Russian-French photographer discovers places like Yakutia and its indigenous populations, including the Evenki reindeer herders and the Yakuts, permanent breeders of cows and horses. The soft colors of his shots convey the anxiety of these communities, witnesses of the symbiotic relationship with an extreme nature which today is put at risk by the consequences of industrialization.
In Cloud Physics, American photographer Terri Weifenbach explores the vital interconnection between the clouds of our planet and the intimate forms of its biological life. The backbone of this work is a series of photographs taken in an American research institute for the study and measurement of clouds, their origin, structure, particles and reactions. The abstruse instruments we see are designed to express ephemeral atmospheric phenomena, but Weifenbach's camera – and his way of looking – gives us our terrestrial organic world as an unquantifiable mystery.
Lisa Barnard with the exhibition An Act of Faith: Bitcoin and the Speculative Bubble leads to reflection on the essentiality of nature in the creation of bitcoins, digital goods which, although intangible, require an enormous environmental effort. The British photographer documents the exploitation of geothermal energy in Iceland, necessary to support the mining process: the cold Icelandic temperatures, in fact, mean that the heat masses generated by the hardware involved are significantly reduced, helping to maintain a obedient microclimate.
Bruno Serralongue dedicates his project, entitled Community Gardens of Vertus, Aubervilliers, to the fight - on a local scale, but linked to a broader awareness of the need to preserve livable environments in the face of ecocidal projects - that some gardeners started in 2020 to oppose the demolition of over 4,000 square meters of vegetable gardens, in favor of new buildings for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. This happens less than two kilometers from Paris, in Aubervilliers in Seine-Saint-Denis, the most populous department in France and where green spaces are the least numerous.
