From 11 June to 5 September 2021, the Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste will host the exhibition Nelle città di Gabriele Basilico curated by Giovanna Calvenzi and Filippo Maggia, organised by Erpac, the regional authority for cultural heritage, in collaboration with the Archivio Gabriele Basilico in Milan and Skira Editore.

Gabriele Basilico

An undisputed master of contemporary photography, Gabriele Basilico has turned his interest and research to urban space and its transformations, discovering, in his countless travels, widespread analogies between the world’s cities. Correspondences found in borderline places as well as in historic centres, with mutations and architectural overlays stratified over time. Within his vast body of work reflecting on the modifications of urbanised territories in the transition from the industrial to the post-industrial era, the theme of the city as a complex and refined product of economy and history occupies a central place.

He himself wrote: ‘Photographing the city does not mean choosing the best architecture and isolating it from its context in order to enhance its aesthetic, compositional dimension, but for me it means exactly the opposite. That is, to put ‘cultured’ architecture and ‘ordinary’ architecture on the same level, to build a place of coexistence, because the real city, the city that I am interested in narrating, contains this mixture of excellence and mediocrity, of centre and periphery, even in the most recent recomposition of roles: a vision of urban space that, with a bit of rhetoric, we would once have called democratic’.