From June 26 to Sept. 26, 2025, the Sala Pïana of the Biblioteca Malatestiana in Cesena will host tOUR, an exhibition that stems from the encounter between two seemingly distant archives: on the one hand, the photographic work of Olivo Barbieri (Carpi, 1954); on the other, a selection of ancient volumes kept in the funds of the same library. The exhibition, curated by Stefania Rössi, Elena Mucelli and Paolo Zanfini, is sponsored by the municipalities of Cesena and Castelfranco Veneto, the University of Bologna and OMNE Osservatorio Mobile Nord Est. The project is part of the OMNE LAND initiative . Other Storms, supported by Photography Strategy 2024 and the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. The exhibition is proposed as a visual journey connecting different eras and languages, comparing for the first time, at least in terms of exhibition, the archive of a contemporary photographer with the historical heritage of a long-standing library.
The project is based on an analog and dissonant approach at the same time, in which Barbieri’s works, urban landscapes photographed from above with selective framing and differentiated focus, dialogue with representations of cities and architecture found in ancient texts. Underlying tOUR is the idea of landscape as a fragment, as a detail capable of generating a narrative. An approach shared as much by Barbieri’s photographs as by the ancient engravings and views contained in the volumes on display. The exhibition thus proposes a new key to interpreting the Italian and international landscape, offering the public an opportunity to explore the gaze of the contemporary artist alongside that of cartographers, engravers and illustrators of the past. The selection of Barbieri’s 39 photographic works, some of them previously unpublished, is distinguished by a conscious use of aerial perspective, which enables the capture of urban stratifications and territorial transformations. In parallel, the images in the historical texts return an equally analytical view, albeit constructed with different tools, of cities and territories observed with millimetric care. Both gazes, the contemporary and the ancient, dwell on what often escapes attention, restoring value to details and configurations that habitually remain at the margins of collective perception.
Strengthening the installation of the exhibition is the presence of the projection THE PERFECT CITY, a film composed of 7942 still images shot from above, accompanied by RGB color scores and 22 sequences filmed from the ground. The work narrates a strip of territory of about 400 kilometers along the Adriatic coast, from Vasto to Ravenna, crossing Abruzzo, Marche and Emilia-Romagna. The editing avoids a descriptive approach, preferring a fragmented, visual narrative that focuses on form rather than documentation. The entire project is proposed as a reflection on the image and its power to construct imaginaries, identity and knowledge. The comparison of languages and materials, between photography and antique prints, aims to stimulate a critical awareness of the landscape and its representation. Barbieri’s works, with their ability to shift the point of view and suggest new readings of the territory, are thus revealed to be part of a broader discourse involving the entire cultural apparatus of representation.
On the occasion of the exhibition, the volume tOUR, published by Skinnerboox, will be published, bringing together images, bibliographic research and critical essays. The book will serve as an extension of the exhibition project, offering a space for reflection and in-depth study of the themes addressed. The dialogue between ancient and contemporary, between archive and creation, is thus also developed in editorial form, expanding the reach of the exhibition and making its contents accessible outside the exhibition space. tOUR is part of the broader OMNE LAND program. Other Storms, a series of events involving various cultural and academic entities in the promotion and dissemination of photographic culture.
The next event will be held at the Giorgione Museum in Castelfranco Veneto, where the exhibition Altre Tempeste (Other Storms) will run from September 26 to November 2, 2025. On that occasion, the new photographic corpus created by Barbieri, the result of a research on the contemporary Veneto landscape inspired by the figure and work of Giorgione, will be previewed and presented in its entirety. The survey, launched in September 2023, explores the region’s urban, architectural and cultural transformations, relating Renaissance painting to the current condition of the territory. Central to the project, once again, is the dialogue between languages: photography as a tool for visual reflection and painting as a symbolic matrix from which a possible interpretation of the present emerges.
Olivo Barbieri is among the protagonists of contemporary Italian photography. His research has always focused on the vision and representation of the landscape, urban and natural. Starting in the mid-1970s he devoted himself to the study of artificial lighting in European and Eastern cities. He exhibited for the first time in 1978 with the project Flippers and in 1982 took part in Viaggio in Italia. Since 1989 he has traveled frequently to Asia, especially to China, where he began a long investigation - still ongoing - into the transformations taking place and the ways in which they are represented. In 1996 the Museum Folkwang in Essen dedicated a retrospective to him. Beginning in the mid-1990s he experimented with a photographic technique that allowed him to focus only on certain details of the image, opening up new interpretive perspectives. In 2001 he published Virtual Truths. Two years later he inaugurated the cycle site specific_, an articulated project between photography and cinema that analyzes the form of more than sixty contemporary cities and metropolises; in 2013 Aperture published a synthesis in the volume site specific_03-13.
In 2006 he participated in the II Seville Biennial, where, at the invitation of Okwui Enwezor, he made the film SEVILLA -’ (∞) 06. In 2010 he signed the Dolomites Project, a book and exhibition for the MART of Trento and Rovereto. Five years later, MAXXI in Rome mounts its first Italian retrospective, Immagini 1978-2014, also presenting the film La Città Perfetta. In 2025, the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin offers a new retrospective, OTHER SPACES. China 1989-2019. Two films from the site-specific_ series are now housed in the permanent collection of MoMA New York. More than sixty volumes, including monographs and catalogs, document his work, which is present in numerous public and private collections in Europe, Asia and the United States.
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| Landscape between past and present: Olivo Barbieri on display at the Malatestiana in Cesena |
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