TORINO.- Intesa Sanpaolo Gallerie d’Italia will be presenting 'Luca Locatelli: The Circle', the world premiere of a new series of photographs by the 2020 World Press Photo Contest winner and internationally renowned reporter Luca Locatelli.
For the last years, Locatelli has been travelling around many different countries – Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Spain and Switzerland to cite a few – to document practices and stories that could shed light on that model of production and consumption known as the Circular Economy.
This exhibition at Gallerie d’Italia in Turin presents more than 100 photographs made by Locatelli in the last two years of his research journey around Europe, along with new video works and infographics, offering insights into contemporary, experimental sustainable practices and initiatives: from the world's first high-altitude floating solar park, in Lac des Toiles, Switzerland to the system used by a company in Ría de Arousa, Spain to create a sustainable and highly effective filtration system for sea impurities.
'Luca Locatelli: The Circle' is organised with the knowledge support from the Chicago-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in collaboration with Fondazione Cariplo and Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, and in partnership with Leica. The Circular Economy is defined by the European Union as “a production and consumption model that involves sharing, lending, reusing, repairing, reconditioning and recycling existing materials and products for as long as possible”. Fifty years after its theorisation, Circularity is now one of the most promising and ambitious strategies for creating an environmentally, productively and industrially sustainable future. Words like recirculation, reuse and recycling have started to increasingly populate assessments and analyses of long-term policies and our potential for wealth, identifying over time the key points of the problem, such as how to manage the exhaustion of primary resources, the illusion of exponential growth or the management of waste.
The Circle is a photographic project narrating the revolution of possible solutions. Following a very long research project, Luca Locatelli has documented the good practices, experiments, ambitions and paths of this new utopia. His ten-year commitment to the subject is condensed in the stories commissioned by Gallerie d'Italia of Intesa Sanpaolo, presented for the first time in a unitary context in this exhibition.
Visitors are taken on a European journey of experimentation and sustainable industrial advancement, touching on themes such as geothermal energy, the recycling of textiles, the repurposing of abandoned industrial areas, and food. The stories portray real experiences of Nature Based Solutions, actions undertaken to protect, sustain and restore natural ecosystems, which, when applied to industrial and production models, have the potential to trigger the Cultural Transformation needed to change the course of things. Accompanied by a substantial set of infographics and explanatory texts, the images tell of experiences and realities in which the finest engineering, craftsmanship and ancestral wisdom go hand in hand to create a space where Nature can be a central issue again, and where man’s knowledge and wisdom can be at the service of environmental forces in order to benefit from their power, without attempting to tame and imprison them: those Nature-Based Solutions which, more than any other, offer us the greatest chance of success. They show us how the most futuristic technology and the intuition of self-production can both contribute to the same goal - the closing of the circle, the possibility of a perpetual system.
The possibility of success.
Gallerie d'Italia
'Luca Locatelli: The Circle'
September 20th, 2023 - February 18th, 2024
Curated by Elisa Medde
