Trentino - Gabriele Basilico’s photographic journey
Through his photographic project, Trentino, Gabriele Basilico carries out a clear analysis of the transformations of this region. Above all he pays attention to the relationship between natural and urban landscape, in order to highlight the complexity and contradictions in the connection between natural and artificial entities, between human being and environment.
In this way Basilico is giving us a renewed interpretation of this land, with the aim of describing and understanding morphology of different bodies, instead of simply identifying its well-known natural beauties.
Foreshortened views of houses, rivers, streets and whole valleys caught by the shots of the photographer from Milan are the results of a journey undertaken by a keen observer, and not a naive tourist, who wants to underline the signs of human intervention as symbols of a transformation and wants to express a dialogue between the complexity of these traces and the natural environment.

Biography
The work of Gabriele Basilico (Milan,1944) is currently one of focuses of an international debate on cities and contemporary scenery. For more than 20 years he has been engaged in multifaceted work on reading and interpreting the complexity of Europe’s change from an industrial to post-industrial age.

His research starts with the collection Milano, containing portraits of factories (an analysis of the Milan’s formerly industrial outskirts, carried out between 1978 and 1980). After that, he takes part in Mission Photographique of D.A.T.A.R. (Délégation à l'Aménagement du Territoire et à l'Action Régionale), the largest and most comprehensive European photographic campaign of the twentieth century, comparable for its historic importance to the American Farm Security Administration’s campaigns, organized by the French government from 1983 to 1988.

Among the many experiences, it is worth mentioning Bord de mer, a journey along the North coast of France, done at the request of the French government (1984-85), Porti di mare (Ports of the sea) (1982-88) and the photographic campaign on Beirut (1991), completed at the end of a long war in collaboration with famous protagonists of photography such as Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka and Raymond Depardon. From the mid 80’s, in a context of increasing interest in the transformations of the landscape, Basilico faces the problem of the challenging comprehension and the likely interpretation of the new features human habitat is taking on. He is doing this as a photographer and tries through photography to reconstruct the issues both from a conceptual and an aesthetic point of view.

Meaningful are his new works on Milan, where Gabriele Basilico was born, lives and works: The interrupted City (1996) and the project on six parallel paths from one city to another, in six different areas of Italy Sezioni del paesaggio italiano (“Sections of Italian landscape” 1996). The theme of the territorial identity between historic preexistence and modern development is well presented in the anthology on Trentino (1993), here displayed.

Opening time: 8.30-13.00 - 14.00 - 18.00
The exhibition will be open until June 30, 2006
Free entrance