Visitors

Visitors? Aliens? Martians?

Who are these beings crowding historic cities, museums and monuments? Ezio Ferreri’s photographic work explores the relationship between places and their temporary invaders: the hit-and-run tourist.

Thousands of people tread the streets of these cities every day with a single, urgent concern: to take away proof. A photograph, a selfie, something that says “I was there”. A gesture of symbolic appropriation that takes the place of discovery and understanding.

In Ferreri’s images, from the forecourt of Milan Cathedral to St Mark’s Square, from the dome of Berlin’s Reichstag to museum galleries, the visitor never truly looks. They photograph. They pose. They mimic the artwork. They turn their back on the landscape to look at themselves on a screen. Art, history and culture become mere backdrop, interchangeable scenery for their own social media narrative.

These are the protagonists of overtourism. A phenomenon that is more than a flow: it is a form of intoxication. An occupation that overwhelms our cities, irrevocably alters their social and economic fabric, and erases their traditions, relationships and memory.

Might they even be the root cause of gentrification? Ferreri offers a visual response rather than a sociological one. With gentle irony and critical distance, he shows us estrangement: bodies out of place, absent gazes, solitude in the crowd. The visitor as alien, indeed. A Martian who has landed for a few minutes in a place whose language and time they do not understand.

In this sense, “Visitors” is the mirror image of the work on villas. There, training the eye helped recover the detail lost in the panorama; here, the crowd within the panorama makes it impossible to see any detail at all.