Guido Guidi (Cesena, 1941) studied at the University Institute of Architecture and the Advanced Course in Industrial Design in Venice in the 1960s, where he was a student of Italo Zannier, among others. Active in photographic research since 1969, he has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad and is recognised as one of the leading protagonists of international photography.
A long-time lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna and the Faculty of Design and Art at the Iuav University of Venice, Guidi has long had a connection with Friuli Venezia Giulia. Since 1985, upon request of the CRAF in Spilimbergo and other institutions in the region, he has held numerous teaching workshops and created a wide range of photography projects related to the contemporary landscape. Awarded the FVG Photography Prize in 1988, he has twice won the Hemingway Prize in Lignano Sabbiadoro (in 2014 and 2020). His first retrospective volume, Varianti (Variants), was published in 1995 by Arti Grafiche Friulane.
Ten years after the publication of Guardando a Est (Looking East), a book edited by Walter Liva that retraced the fourteen stops on this thirty-year exploration of the territory, the curators collaborated with the photographer, the Guidi Archive in Cesena and the CRAF Archive to propose a new reading of photographic series and sequences that are still partially unpublished.
‘I am the first viewer of what I do,’ says Guidi, returning to the places he photographed with the eyes of memory, proposing the route you will see in this exhibition. The first series on Trieste in 1985 was followed by works realised during workshops held with young people in Spilimbergo in 1991, 1994, 1995 and in 1997 (in dialogue with the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini); in Lestans in 1992 and 1998; in Venzone in 1996, twenty years after the earthquake; in Pielungo and Pinzano in 1999. At the invitation of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Trieste, Guidi researched, much like his other work, physically and mentally ‘out-of-place’ perspectives in the ATER neighborhoods in Udine in 1999 and in Trieste in 2002. In 2004, he tackled the theme of the transformation of the border in Gorizia, and in 2014, he focused on San Vito al Tagliamento and Lignano Sabbiadoro.
This journey of landscapes and details testifies to the continuous renewal of the visual language of Guidi, who over time has created an unprecedented and complex iconography of our contemporary landscape. In these images, places offer themselves as rich palimpsests of signs and untold stories, of ambitious projects and everyday gestures, of ‘high’ cultures and ‘low’ customs. It is important to recognise the value of ‘anythingness’ that Guidi observes; to walk through the ‘cracks’ that open up between things, to work in the uncertain ‘margins’ that separate and unite what we know or think we know. In these photographs, the landscape ultimately becomes a pulsating and enigmatic subject, a presence that ideally returns our gaze, and in doing so questions our capacity for care and understanding.
