Interconnectedness and globalization in 300 shots: a major exhibition in Forli

From Sept. 17, 2022 to Jan. 8, 2023, the San Domenico Museums in Forlì will host theonly Italian stop of an international exhibition that after Seoul, Beijing, Auckland, Melbourne and Marseille comes to Italy enriched by an original focus that completes the analysis on today’s world.

Curated by William A. Ewing and Holly Roussell with Justine Chapalay, in collaboration with Walter Guadagnini, Monica Fantini and Fabio Lazzari for the Italian edition, and co-produced by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (Minneapolis/ New York/ Paris/ Lausanne) and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea in Seoul, in collaboration with Fondazione Cassa dei Risparmi di Forlì, the exhibition Civilization. Living, Surviving, Good Living will address issues of the present and future of the contemporary world, increasingly characterized by the phenomena of interconnectedness and globalization, through three hundred images by more than 130 female photographers from five continents.

The exhibition is intended to be a story in images of the planetary civilization of the 21st century as a great collective enterprise, capable of producing unprecedented innovations, discoveries and opportunities, but also risks and threats to the very survival of humanity. Images dedicated to the great technological achievements, human interventions in the environment, and the great phenomena of aggregation and physical and intangible movements that characterize the world in which we live will be on display.

"The implicit theme of Civilization,“ say the coordinators of the Forlì edition Walter Guadagnini, Monica Fantini and Fabio Lazzari, ”is that of the relationships between human beings and the inevitable consequences that every individual and collective choice is bound to have in a context in which individuals live in an increasingly interdependent and interconnected way."

The exhibition is divided into eight sections devoted to as many themes. Alongside such pivotal exponents of international photography as Edward Burtynsky, Candida Höfer, Richard Mosse, Alec Soth, Larry Sultan, Thomas Struth, Penelope Umbrico and others, there will be Italian authors such as Olivo Barbieri, Michele Borzoni, Gabriele Galimberti, Walter Niedermayr, Carlo Valsecchi, Massimo Vitali, Luca Zanier, and Francesco Zizola.

It starts from the images of large metropolises at the center of ALVEARE/ HIVE, to explore the urban networks that shape modern cities and describe the complicated flows of human activities in ever-changing contexts, narrated by Robert Polidori and Pablo López Luz, or from iconic buildings such as Philippe Chancel’s Burj Khalifa Tower and Olivo Barbieri’s Torres de Satélite.

To people and their relationships is dedicated the SOLI INSIEME/ ALONE TOGETHER section, which focuses on the increasing digitization as an element and tool of these relationships, well represented by the portraits of Pieter Hugo and Katy Grannan and the images of soldiers communicating through Skype by Adam Ferguson.

In FLOW/ FLOW Alejandro Cartagena’s Carpoolers, Mike Kelley and Jeffrey Milstein’s aircraft images or Alex MacLean’s containers reveal the visible and invisible movements of people, goods and ideas through the contemporary world, highlighting the impact this flow has on all of us.

In PERSUASION/ PERSUASION we find photographs of major collective events, such as those by Mark Power and Nick Hannes, or images devoted to advertising by Robert Walker, Andrew Esiebo, Lauren Greenfield and Priscilla Briggs to expose the mechanisms of persuasion used by advertising, religion and politics.

In the CONTROL/ CONTROL section, authors such as Lynne Cohen, Philippe Chancel and Luca Zanier shape the impact of various types of authority and the desire to give order and structure to our future development.

BREAKING/ RUPTURE examines the phenomena of social disintegration, revealing the conflicts between individuals and forcing an awareness of the failures of civilization, immortalized in exemplary fashion in the images of Mandy Barker, Xing Danwen and Penelope Umbrico. In this section, the Forli exhibition wanted to emblematically include for the first time images of two capital events that in recent years have shown the risks and fragility of contemporary civilization: the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

In contrast, we find images of amusement parks such as those of Reiner Riedler or the crowded beaches of Massimo Vitali and Zhang Xiao at the center of FUGA/ ESCAPE, which examine the phenomena of leisure and recreational moments, revealing the mechanisms, contradictions and paradoxes of the entertainment industry.

With futuristic images by Valérie Belin, Simon Norfolk and Vincent Fournier, or even photographs of a rocket that took off from the space base in French Guinea and the world’s largest radio telescope by Michael Najjar, AND THEN.../ NEXT closes the survey of how the world of the 21st century is taking shape, with its rapid global evolution.

For info: https://mostracivilization.it/

Image: Mark Power, The funeral of Pope John Paul II broadcast live from the Vatican. Warsaw, Poland, from the series The Sound of Two Songs, 2005. Credit Mark Power / Magnum Photos.

Interconnectedness and globalization in 300 shots: a major exhibition in Forli

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