From July 12 to September 14, 2025, the spaces of the Loggia degli Abati at Palazzo Ducale in Genoa will host Jacopo Benassi Libero!, an exhibition that offers an articulated look at the La Spezia photographer’s most recent production. Curated by Francesco Zanot, the exhibition unfolds as a large installation in which photography, sculpture, painting, music and performance coexist and contaminate each other, shaping a broad reflection on the language of the contemporary image. Jacopo Benassi (La Spezia, 1970) is known for a radical approach to photography, which tends to deconstruct the medium and question the vision itself. The focus is on recent and unpublished works that mark milestones in the elaboration of a language that is recognizable, personal, and at the same time unstable. Photography, in Benassi’s practice, is an open device, capable of acting on reality, transforming it and questioning it.
The exhibition layout is conceived as a single body: the path is articulated in the rooms of the Loggia degli Abati, redesigned by the direct intervention of the artist. The interaction between image, support and space generates an environment in which the act of exhibition merges with the act of production. Completing the exhibition will be a new work created during an artistic residency conducted within the Ducal Palace itself between June 1 and 30. The work, produced over the course of the month-long on-site work, will later become part of the permanent collection of the Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art.
As is often the case in Benassi’s work, the studio itself, a place of making, becomes an integral part of the project. During the residency, the artist will relocate his studio inside the Palazzo Ducale, where he will work open-door, involving the public in a participatory process that transcends the distinction between author and viewer. The month-long calendar will be enlivened by a program of events that includes workshops, meetings, conversations and performances. Participation is not ancillary, but a constitutive element of artistic practice. The creative process expands, welcoming influences, contacts, exchanges. The residency is curated by the BLU Association - Breeding and Learning Unit of Genoa, and was created as part of a call from the Ministry of Culture. In addition to direct dialogue with the public, the initiative includes collaboration with students from the Academic Master’s program in Photography and Visual Design at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti), who will participate in a course of confrontation and training in the field. The experience is thus configured as an open laboratory in which teaching, production and experimentation are intertwined. The exhibition and the program of activities that precedes it are part of a larger project to redefine the language of photography, in which Benassi, through his own work, questions established visual codes and explores the possibilities for their liberation. Photography becomes a starting point to cross other territories: that of performative action, installation, matter and physical space. It is no coincidence that his research increasingly takes on the features of a hybrid, in which the image is only one of the components at play. The project is supported by Strategia Fotografia 2024, a program promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, and is a collaboration between Fondazione Palazzo Ducale, Museo di Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, NABA and the BLU Association. The presentation press conference is scheduled for Friday, July 11, at 11:30 a.m.
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| Jacopo Benassi on show in Genoa: an investigation into the body of photography and its boundaries |
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