Archivi Aperti 2026

A visit to Ezio Ferreri’s studio offers an opportunity to explore his archive: from projects made in the 1980s, such as “La ricchezza intelligente” and “Ville di Bagheria e dintorni”, whose images celebrate outstanding architecture from splendid periods in Sicily’s history and the stories of enlightened patrons; to the 1990s project “Le pietre di Palermo”, in which people find no welcome, or the contemporary “Teatri di Palermo”, some of whose theatres stood abandoned.

Between 1998 and 2000, he worked on a major project, “I Fantasmi di Poggioreale”, about one of the towns struck by the 1968 Belìce earthquake. He approached it through three different photographic languages, returning to the project in 2018, fifty years after the earthquake. It is a journey through ruins in which the photographer becomes an archaeologist, and only objects can bear witness to lives once lived.

In 2001, he began “Passaggi alla Biennale”, a project on the Venice Biennale, seen as a place of dizzying encounters akin to Stendhal syndrome.

“Metropolis / São Paulo”, from 2009, is a journey into one of the world’s most populous cities. Ezio Ferreri uses two different conceptual and practical approaches. Views of the city composed according to the classical conventions of architectural photography are accompanied by “i passi”, taken without framing and without any control over the shot. This duality brings out the contradictions of architecture and of individuals in search of their own identity.

“Berlin, Side B”, made in the same year, favours an unusual viewpoint, photographing both the backs of buildings, which reveal the city’s true essence, and the contrasting colours of their façades, an expression of Berliners’ desire to move beyond the greyness of the Cold War years.

“Tabula rasa” is a photographic investigation of new suburbs marked by buildings that have never been completed. Here, using a pinhole on a view camera was essential to creating images that seem to exist outside time. The work was exhibited at the international biennial Manifesta 12 in 2018. In “Le Stanze”, a photographic idea by Ezio Ferreri brings together seven writers and seven actors to create stories about rooms that are now uninhabited, but still retain traces of the people who spent their lives there.

Other projects emerge from exploring the archive, where individual photographs accumulate over the years. Brought together with images taken at different times and in different circumstances, they acquire new meanings and give rise to new narratives. This is the case with “Tracce di giochi su antiche pietre”, photographs of children playing in the streets of Sicily between 1970 and 2000, and with “Visitors”, images of intrusive, superficial tourism.

The archive also provided the idea for “In Sicilia. Cronache del Paesaggio ultimo”, a project about Sicily’s varied, multifaceted landscape, which has reached the end of an era and stands on the brink of being torn apart and degraded beyond repair.

If requested, the visit will also include a brief look at his professional work for visual communication.

The visit will provide an opportunity to reflect on managing both an analogue archive, with formats ranging from 35 mm to large format, and a digital archive, from low to high resolutions, and to consider the eventual destination of printed photographs.