From Nov. 29, 2025, to June 14, 2026, the Alto Garda Museum in Riva del Garda, Trentino, Italy, will present for the first time in a public institution the entire body of Ultimate Landscapes, the photographic project that Claudio Orlandi has built up over seventeen years of walking through major Alpine glaciers. The exhibition, entitled Claudio Orlandi. Ultimate Landscapes. The Illusion of Ice and curated by Matteo Rapanà and Alessia Locatelli, is part of the initiatives promoted on the occasion of theInternational Year of the Preservation of Glaciers and expands the path of reflection that the museum is dedicating to the themes of contemporary environmental and social transformations.
The exhibition brings together thirteen photographic series made by the Roman artist along an itinerary that, starting in 2008, has crossed symbolic places in the Alps, from Presena to Marmolada, from the Swiss Rhonegletscher to the Stelvio. In these environments, marked by the climate crisis and human attempts to mitigate the effects of ice collapse, Orlandi has developed a language that combines documentation and research. The shots record the retreat of the glacial masses, but at the same time they investigate the material complexity of the landscape, transforming folds, seams and tears of the geotextile sheets spread to protect the ice into narrative elements that dialogue with natural forms. The presence of these sheets, applied seasonally on the surfaces of glaciers to slow their melting, becomes one of the conceptual cores of the project. Orlandi observes them as ambivalent signs: tools designed to care for the land and at the same time symbols of an unresolved tension between conservation and control. In the photographs, such artificial surfaces end up blending with the material of the ice itself, generating images that oscillate between the document and an abstraction capable of restoring the fragility of the relationship between man and the environment. As Maria Fratelli noted, those sheets appear as shrouds, exposed on the landscape to bear witness to a memory that is slowly fading away.
“Museums today are places of dialogue and interpretation of the present,” say the curators, “capable of interrogating reality and imagining the future. Orlandi’s project invites us to stop, to observe, to question what model of development we want for the mountains and the planet we inhabit.”
The exhibition in the MAG’s Pinacoteca highlights how each photographic series constitutes an autonomous chapter, the result of repeated observation over time. In the transition from the Rhonegletscher to the Stelvio to the most recent Marmolada climbs, Orlandi records the changing landscape with a language that restores a sense of suspension. Light shapes surfaces that change from season to season; the cracks in the mountain become traces that tell of the progressive loss of glacial mass; the sheets adapt to these variations by taking on a form that, in the images, recalls drapery, drapery, folds that evoke a fragile and changing corporeity. The photographs show the mountain as it recedes, hinting at a shifting balance and a landscape that belongs to an era destined to disappear.
The Alto Garda Museum’s decision to dedicate a monographic exhibition to Ultimate Landscapes is part of the institution’s path to address, through the language of visual arts, global issues such as the climate crisis and the reconfiguration of the natural environment. Photography thus becomes a tool capable of translating a scientific phenomenon into a perceptive and cognitive experience. Orlandi’s images present themselves as thresholds: on the one hand they show the beauty of an extreme landscape, on the other they reveal its vulnerability. The observer is placed in front of a process that takes place over a lifetime and that, although the subject of monitoring and analysis, still appears difficult to make tangible to the general public. The strength of the project lies precisely in the possibility of crossing this distance, offering direct contact with an ongoing transformation.
Claudio Orlandi, Ultimate Landscapes 12-1 20 24 (2024). Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Alongside the photographic journey, the exhibition introduces a sound element created by sound designer Alessio Mosti. The installation Unveil comes from recordings made through hydrophones and contact microphones, which capture the physical sounds produced by the crumbling of ice. These materials are processed until they become part of a musical composition in which the ambient sound no longer plays an ancillary role but constitutes the harmonic and rhythmic core of the work. The result is a parallel narrative that accompanies the visual one, reinforcing the perception of a changing landscape and restoring a sensory dimension often ignored in representations of glaciers. Unveil opens and closes its parable with the concrete voice of the ice, making audible a process that normally remains invisible. The dialogue between photography and sound helps to construct an experience that invites the audience to observe, listen to and recognize the magnitude of a change that affects the entire Alpine arc. The combination of the two languages offers an additional level of interpretation: the loss of glacial mass is thus a phenomenon that affects human-land relations, landscape perception, and the collective memory of places.
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| At the Upper Garda Museum, the extreme landscapes of Ultimate Landscapes by Claudio Orlandi |
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