A new exhibition dedicated to Luigi Ghirri and his relationship with music at the Palazzo dei Musei in Reggio Emilia

From April 30, 2026 to February 28, 2027, the Palazzo dei Musei in Reggio Emilia will host the exhibition Luigi Ghirri. A Series of Dreams. Visual Landscapes and Soundscapes. The exhibition, curated by Ilaria Campioli and Andrea Tinterri, with musical curatorship by Giulia Cavaliere, opens as part of the XXI edition of Fotografia Europea. The project also includes a special section titled Beyond Those Mountains the Sea, created with the collaboration of musician Iosonouncane, and an exhibition focus at Teatro Valli, which can be visited until June 14.

In 2021, on the occasion of the rearrangement designed by architect Italo Rota, the second floor of the Palazzo dei Musei was enriched with a new section dedicated to photography. Apermanent area dedicated to Luigi Ghirri, a key figure in the history of contemporary photography and the city’s cultural identity, was also created within this space. The project, promoted by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia-through the Civic Museums and the Panizzi Library Photo Library-in collaboration with the Luigi Ghirri Foundation, includes a new exhibition each year that investigates the complexity of the photographer’s work through innovative critical perspectives and the involvement of contemporary artists. The 2026-2027 edition focuses on what Ghirri called the “mysterious and singular kinship between sound and image,” a relationship that always fascinated him. Indeed, music occupied a central role in his creative universe: witness his admiration for Bob Dylan, his friendship with Lucio Dalla and the rich record collection he owned. Continuous references to music and its influence on the way we observe the world and construct images also emerge in his writings. Like other disciplines, music contributed to the formation of that “image of the outside” on which Ghirri constantly reflected, recognizing in it, like photography, a narrative capacity capable of opening real “visionary glimpses.”

The exhibition A Series of Dreams. Visual Landscapes and Soundscapes addressesthese relationships between photography and music through a path divided into three sections. The central corridor brings together images devoted to places of music: wall drawings featuring trumpets and percussion instruments, interiors of theaters, churches with monumental organs, jukeboxes and pianos. Together these photographs compose a layered portrait that puts popular and high culture in dialogue, showing music as a historical trace or fleeting presence in space.

A second nucleus presents numerous materials-partly unpublished-that document Ghirri’s relationship with various Italian musicians, including Lucio Dalla, Gianni Morandi, Ron, Luca Carboni and the CCCP. This section also provides an opportunity to highlight the contribution of Paola Borgonzoni, designer and Ghirri’s life and work companion, whose role was instrumental in both editorial projects and the design of numerous record covers.

The third part of the exhibition, entitled Oltre quei monti il mare (Beyond Those Mountains the Sea), is designed as a space for research and experimentation on the soundscape, or soundscape, and the relationship between the visual and acoustic environments. Iosonouncane’s artistic intervention, created especially for the exhibition, puts Ghirri’s “ecology of the gaze” in dialogue with the acoustic ecology theorized by composer and scholar R. Murray Schafer. Both, although working in different fields, were reflecting in the same years on the increasing difficulty of seeing and hearing in a world increasingly saturated with stimuli. In this sense, visual landscape and soundscape become two complementary ways to orient oneself and build a conscious relationship with the natural environment.

From April 30 to June 14, 2026, during Fotografia Europea, an additional in-depth study will be hosted in the octagonal hall of the Teatro Valli. Here a selection of images made by Ghirri for classical music covers of the historic RCA Records label will be presented. The choice of this venue is not random: in fact, the theater represents a significant space in the professional history of the photographer, who has long collaborated with Reggio Emilia Theaters documenting performances and environments. Alongside the record covers, photographs from the Municipal Theater’s Historical Archives are also on display, precious testimonies that tell Ghirri’s view of the theater scene and performance time. The exhibition is accompanied by a series of original textual and audio content curated by Giulia Cavaliere: insights, dialogues and interviews that accompany the visitor along the exhibition route and suggest a fruition based on listening. The voices of artists and musicians, some of whom collaborated directly with Ghirri or shared a stretch of his path, thus restore the continuous dialogue between image and sound that runs through the entire project.

“The fruitful collaboration between the Luigi Ghirri Foundation and the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia continues this year with a new exhibition that we are very excited about,” said Adele Ghirri, President of the Luigi Ghirri Foundation. “The latter is part of the broader project of valorization and reinterpretation of my father Luigi’s work through exhibitions that recount aspects and thematic nuclei of his production that are still little known, also relating them to contemporary research and practices, such as that - in this year’s case - of Iosonouncane, whom we thank infinitely for wanting to be part of this project. Luigi’s passion for music and his collaborations with a number of Italian musicians are well known by now, but many photographs related to these stories have never been seen and encourage much broader reflections regarding environment and sound. So we were very happy to make the works and many unpublished archival materials available. It will be a surprise, a dialogue between different artistic languages and it will also shed light, finally, on the work of Paola Borgonzoni (my mother ed.) and how significant a figure she was.”

“With this new rearrangement of the photography section, dedicated to the relationship between sound and image, the commitment of the Reggio Emilia Civic Museums continues in conceiving projects capable of addressing central themes of contemporaneity. In this perspective, the archive is understood not only as a place of preservation and protection, but as an active, political and ethical space, capable of generating new narratives, opening new possibilities for research and giving voice to lesser known and lateral aspects. The exhibition highlights Luigi Ghirri’s deep passion for music, but not only that,” explained the curator of the photography section at Palazzo dei Musei, Ilaria Campioli. “A fundamental core of the project is the one realized thanks to the precious collaboration with musician Iosonouncane, thanks to which the dialogue between soundscape and visual landscape becomes a tool to interrogate the forms of perception and our way of inhabiting the world. The exhibition sees the co-curatorship of Andrea Tinterri and the musical curatorship of Giulia Cavaliere, whose respective contributions have been essential in broadening the field of reflection and building a path capable of interweaving, with rigor and sensitivity, archival research, critical thinking and listening.”

A new exhibition dedicated to Luigi Ghirri and his relationship with music at the Palazzo dei Musei in Reggio Emilia

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