Canada - "Guido Guidi: A New Map of Italy"
Guido Guidi, born in Cesena in 1941, is known worldwide as one of the most important researchers of Italian contemporary photography and a pioneer in the country’s modernization of the same.
The exhibition organized by the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto gathers more than 50 works from the collection of the CCA - Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, taken by the artist at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the new millennium, from the volume A New Map of Italy. The Photographs of Guido Guidi curated by John Gossage and published by Loosestrife Editions in 2011.
Guidi’s work is focused on the Italian contemporary social overview, the result of a path of images which the artist began at a young age and developed in over 50 years of snapshots, using mostly large format cameras.
In this way, Guidi rebuilds his own map of the territory, avoiding the picturesque and the romantic. He focuses on the spontaneous suburban architecture, on harsh secondary roads, on piles of garbage, on spray-painted walls, abandoned depots and construction sites to form a complex and stratified portrait of the contemporary landscape.
Image after image, the illusions of the "Beautiful Country" give space to the other face of Italy, more precarious and also more realistic.
Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto
image: ©Guido Guidi-CCA - Canadian Centre for Architecture
courtesy of Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Toronto