Works of
Noad Addis, Tolga Akbaş, Diego Brambilla, Simon Carruthers, Giuseppe De Santis e Giuseppe Dipace, Silvia Mangosio, Miguel Novais Rodrigues, Mia Carolina Rogersdotter, Julius C. Schreiner

Curated by
Steve Bisson

Orari
Sunday 4:30pm–7:30pm

What impact does environmental change have on society and individuals? At this precise moment in history, awareness of humanity’s ability to affect the planet on both a global and local scale is at an all-time high within the scientific community and increasingly widespread in public opinion. The term Anthropocene, coined by chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen to define the current geological epoch, has entered common usage.
Yet the challenges we face are urgently pressing. A growing generational divide has emerged, with younger generations observing an “adult” class seemingly unable to take the issue seriously. The consequences of this shared impasse are evident, manifesting in the frequent catastrophic events widely covered in the media—fires, floods, storms, and more—in the perpetual pollution of cities and urbanized countryside, in the loss of biodiversity, including cultural diversity, in increasing migration pressures, and in the overall fragility of the human species, ever more allergic to its surroundings.

To approach this theme, the exhibition ‘Ambientale’, in collaboration with Urbanautica—a platform for the study of visual anthropology and cultural landscapes—presents a selection of works that invite viewers to confront the complexity of the issues at stake, glimpse possible perspectives, isolate topics for deeper exploration, and foster, as much as possible, dialogue and debate. The title deliberately emphasizes the adjective “environmental” to decontextualize its common meaning and encourage us to look deeper.

The works on display are windows onto the world that slow the gaze, evoke disenchantment, and create alternative spaces for reflection. Beginning with Tolga Akbaş’ video installation, which documents the relentless transformation of the earth as seen from a spaceship, or Simon Carruthers’ macro scans of landscapes depleted by consumer civilization. Spaces become alienating, forgotten playgrounds, geographies suspended between nostalgia and resignation, as in Noah Addis’ fractured vision of the American dream.

The exhibition also explores conflict and contradiction. Mia Carolina Rogersdotter, through her publication tracing 450 km along the Lule River in Sweden, shows nature channeled and essential to hydroelectric “green” energy production. What is the weight of this compromise? Humanity’s expression of power becomes obstacle, constraint, barrier—an environment hostile even to people, as depicted in Julius C. Schreiner’s images of discriminatory structures.

The exhibition further investigates fiction, camouflage, and simulacra, capturing a need for ecosystems that teeters on the edge of illusion—a comforting, reconciliatory greenwashing glimpsed in the vernacular scenes of Miguel Novais Rodrigues. Yet sedatives are not enough. The unsettling presence remains difficult to ignore, even in forests and mountains, spaces often sought for healing or alternative remedies. Here, Diego Brambilla’s photographs seem more focused on conveying an inner space, almost compensating for a void of desires and emotions. Silvia Mangosio points us toward this void through the human body, sometimes depicted in self-portraits or shaped in sculptural forms that reveal unmistakably concave, hollowed areas.

The earth must be filled—otherwise, it remains empty—with seeds and intention, with labor and sharing, with respect and humble deeds. This is the impression left by the narrative conveyed through images by Giuseppe De Santis and Giuseppe Dipace.