Le Piazze [in]visibili

Le Piazze [In]visibili is a photography and writing project, which brings together me and Caterina Serra and other 40 writers and photographers to tell the condition of lockdown in Italy thought its most important squares. Curated by Marco de Logu the project will became an exhibition and book. An initiative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

The inspiration for this project was derived from this: from the Commissione and from Rykwert and Calvino’s work, and from the wish to discover “my” Rome in other cities, in the images and words of the many photographers and writers who participated in it. I thus decided to bring together photographers and writers in this project, each with the expressive power of their medium, to offer a sort of parallel account of a piazza that represents a little motherland4 to them. During my tenure at the head of the Italian Cultural Institute in London, I keenly cultivated an environment in which crossover between the various arts formed the backbone of the Institute’s activities and subsequently converged in the four volumes of Conversazioni a Belgrave Square5 . I wanted to continue along this path for this project and the creation of the “pairs” themselves was a very interesting aspect of its preparation. Some of them were old acquaintances, others weren’t, but they always had strong ties to the location due to biographical reasons, or life choices, or family histories. A lot of the contributors spent the lockdown a few metres from the chosen piazza, while others had lived there for many years. It was a complex challenge, as it was necessary to act immediately, finding ideas and points of view, combining the personal and the historical, bringing out everyone’s originality but bearing in mind certain guidelines. The project was monumental works of art and architecture, but also in the wide prevalence of writing and photography and in their extensive and promising transfer between generations. The involvement of forty writers and photographers and the dialogue generated among them were the most exciting part of this work, which I strongly believe has great scope for expansion throughout the country in order to achieve the entirely realistic aim of providing a photograph of a hundred piazzas.

Marco De Logu