"Round Trip. A Brief Guide for Radical Tourists in Val Venosta" is much more than a book: it is an invitation to rethink the way we move through places, how we look at them, and how we tell their stories. Born from the encounter between Ugo La Pietra and Manuel Canelles, the editorial project presents itself as a cultural and performative device that dismantles the logic of conventional tourism, transforming the travel guide into a poetic and critical experience.
The volume does not provide maps to find your way, but tools to lose it, proposing a journey that weaves together images, notes, reflections, and theoretical contributions. Six emblematic sites of Val Venosta—from the submerged bell tower of Lake Resia to the marble quarries of Lasa—become occasions to question the landscape, freeing it from postcard narratives and restoring it as living, fragile, problematic matter.
Manuel Canelles’ contribution, in particular, moves between theory and storytelling, reflecting on the meaning of contemporary travel and on the power of images to shape the collective imagination. From this perspective, the landscape is not a backdrop to be consumed but a stratified text to be read and rewritten.
The lecture with Canelles will thus be an opportunity to discover an alternative geography—intimate and critical—capable of opening up new possibilities of vision and experience.
Bio
Manuel Canelles is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working across video, photography, installation, and performance. His practice, rooted in relational contexts, explores the precariousness of the present and the ambiguity of memory, moving along the subtle boundaries between personal experience and collective narration. Active also as a curator, cultural manager, and producer, he focuses on the radical practices of the 1970s and 1980s and on processes of social transformation emerging in marginal contexts.
For over twenty-five years, he has pursued research into forms of social precariousness, intertwining artistic engagement and activism, particularly through collaborations with the Antigone association and the Italian Multiple Sclerosis Association. In his works, landscapes, bodies, and communities become narrative devices—sites of shared experience and poetic resistance.
www.canelles.org
"Round Trip. A Brief Guide for Radical Tourists in Val Venosta" is much more than a book: it is an invitation to rethink the way we move through places, how we look at them, and how we tell their stories. Born from the encounter between Ugo La Pietra and Manuel Canelles, the editorial project presents itself as a cultural and performative device that dismantles the logic of conventional tourism, transforming the travel guide into a poetic and critical experience.
The volume does not provide maps to find your way, but tools to lose it, proposing a journey that weaves together images, notes, reflections, and theoretical contributions. Six emblematic sites of Val Venosta—from the submerged bell tower of Lake Resia to the marble quarries of Lasa—become occasions to question the landscape, freeing it from postcard narratives and restoring it as living, fragile, problematic matter.
Manuel Canelles’ contribution, in particular, moves between theory and storytelling, reflecting on the meaning of contemporary travel and on the power of images to shape the collective imagination. From this perspective, the landscape is not a backdrop to be consumed but a stratified text to be read and rewritten.
The lecture with Canelles will thus be an opportunity to discover an alternative geography—intimate and critical—capable of opening up new possibilities of vision and experience.
