Ten international photographers star at Vatican Chapels in the woods of St. George's Island

From May 18 to November 26, on the occasion of the Architecture Biennale 2023, the Giorgio Cini Foundation is presenting at the Vatican Chapels in the woods ofSt. George’s Island, the group exhibition Sacred Landscape, designed to narrate the relationship between spirituality and nature. Curated by Marco Delogu, the exhibition features the work of ten big names in world photography (Don McCullin, Tim Davis, Marco Delogu, Graciela Iturbide, Sally Mann, Martin Parr, Annie Ratti, Guy Tillim, Paolo Ventura, Francesca Woodman), each placed in relation to the architecture of the chapels: The Holy See’s first Pavilion at the 2018 International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, consisting of ten permanent chapels within the Giorgio Cini Foundation’s woodland and included in the guided tour itinerary. A project promoted by the Holy See and supported by the Foundation, which activates the institution’s mission to generate new creative possibilities and dialogue, a unique ground for the emergence of new artistic experiences, enhancement and intercultural exchange.

Created by world-renowned architects from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, the USA, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Chile/Serbia and Paraguay, the Vatican Chapels at the Giorgio Cini Foundation represent an investigation into the places of contemporary spirituality. Respecting the surrounding natural space, they rise in a natural environment such as the forest that becomes a metaphor for the wanderings of life. The project is inspired by Gunnar Asplund ’s Forest Chapel built in 1920 in the Stockholm cemetery and curated by Professor Francesco Dal Co.

For Giorgio Cini Foundation Secretary General Renata Codello, “the Sacred Landscape exhibition takes on a fundamental role in emphasizing the importance of sacredness as a place, to its connection with space, here understood also as landscape. At the same time, it reflects on the role of man as custodian and creator of meanings; it reminds us of our responsibility to preserve and enhance the spiritual dimension of life, inviting us to think about the different expressive possibilities of landscape in the formal definition of contemporary space. A new dimension to be discovered through the photographs of ten great authors, selected by Marco Delogu to accompany us on this journey through the woods and Chapels of the extraordinary project curated by Professor Francesco Dal Co. A horizon that is enriched, once again, by the dialogue between the arts, in the mission of enhancement and restitution promoted by the Giorgio Cini Foundation.”

With this spirit Sacred Landscape was born, the chiasmus between the shots selected by Marco Delogu and these places of worship of nature; here English photographer Don McCullin, known for his shots in which he has documented the atrocities of conflicts and violent injustices in the world, enters the chapel designed by Norman Foster with the image The Ravello Woods (2005): a solemn composition imbued with mysticism and sacredness that interacts with the architect’s dense composition and evocative environment. American Sally Mann brings Deep South #22 (2004) to the chapel of Chilean Smiljan Radic: an image in which the protagonist is a log emerging from the water, dark yet serene, in dialogue with the leafless trunk guarded and protected by the architecture, as an exact response to the same celebration.

Return to the Woods is the chosen work of Francesca Woodman (1980), an American photographer who died prematurely at the age of only twenty-two. In the summer of 1980, in her studio, the artist imagined returning the wooden table to the tree, to the woods, in a metamorphosis between artificial, human, and natural. The work shares with Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats’ Morning Chapel the hue of earthenware plaster, characteristic of the building material offering together alternative perspectives and possibilities of being meeting places. Photographer Tim Davis ’ Desert house (2021) glows in the colors of the sky at dusk, silhouetted in the desert on a rocky hill, like a mirage appearing within Francesco Cellini’s architecture. With the series Second Nature, Tahiti (2011), South African Guy Tillim moves away from the documentary photography that has characterized his work, telling the world about the effects of Apartheid, the drama of child soldiers in the Congo, and post-colonialism, going on a (re)discovery of paradise on earth, in the footsteps of James Cook and Paul Gauguin, facing the same dilemma as the authors: how to represent such an idyllic landscape, telling the potential and limits of the photographic medium. A reflection that in Sacred Landscape takes shape in Javier Corvalán’s circular structure, suspended between heaven and earth. And again, the ethereal and abstract landscape of Marco Delogu’s White Nature #14 (2008), created by the movement of the wind and an atmosphere of low, white sky, dialogues with the small eco-sustainable building, a detailed place of worship, by Terunobu Fujimori. Martin Parr ’s image of Crimsworth Dean Methodist Chapel (1971) tells of a highly symbolic and identifiable place in a Yorkshire community, entering a new narrative in which it dialogues with the sense of gathering and sharing of Andrew Berman’s chapel.

The four shots that make up Annie Ratti’s photographic work, Mushrooms (2014), lying on the ground near Carla Juacaba’s chapel, depict different stages of growth of a mushroom with hallucinogenic properties. The linear compositions and chromatic compactness of Paolo Ventura ’s photograph Milano 2023 are juxtaposed with the discreet presence, like a pure line drawn in nature, of the Vatican chapel by Australian architect Sean Godsell. The ideal path closes between the physical places and the soul, mythologies and archaic cults transported into the contemporary that unite the work of Graciela Iturbide in the portrait of Mujer Angel (2011), an indigenous woman from Mexico of the Seri people inhabiting the Sonora desert, inserted in the architecture of Eduardo Souto de Moura: thick blocks of Vicenza stone, resting on each other, which are perceived as an ancient monolith.

The exhibition is realized with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and will be presented in several Italian Cultural Institutes around the world. The project is realized in collaboration with Zintek.

Pictured is the Morning Chapel by Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats.

Ten international photographers star at Vatican Chapels in the woods of St. George's Island

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