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Background information
"Between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, Luigi GHIRRI (1943-1992) made a series of photographsmeditating on the landscape of his native Italy, all within the grounds of a single theme park in Rimini, Emilia-Romagna. The popular tourist destination 'Italia in Miniatura' presents scale models of Italy’s major natural and architectural landmarks, brought together in surreal proximity. The prominent Italian artist photographed this fabricated world with a characteristic sensitivity for visual coincidence and irony, illusion and reality, ambiguity and artifice. Reflecting on photography’s own processes of shrinking and representing, these images are among his most distinctive, playful, and conceptually compelling.
Content
This new photographic volume, 'Italia in Miniatura' presents the entirety of the 'In Scala' series by Luigi GHIRRI, expanded with numerous previously unseen images, and places them in conversation with work by the park’s founder and designer, Ivo Rambaldi. Rambaldi’s maps, sketches, collages, and reference images, made on exhaustive research trips across Italy, offer an analogous exploration of the possibilities and paradoxes of miniaturisation. Their frank functionality resonates with Luigi GHIRRI's embrace of the perspective and tools of an amateur. From the dialogue between these meticulous works of representation and fabrication we discover the possibility that, in his own words, ‘Perhaps it’s in this very space, one of total fiction, that truth is concealed’.
Additional information
The publication 'Italia in Miniatura' is brought together by curators Ilaria Campioli, Joan FONTCUBERTA, and Matteo Guidi, and includes new essays by the curators and by author Simon Garfield. It is completed by a series of images by photographer and theorist Joan FONTCUBERTA in response to the encounters of Luigi GHIRRI and Ivo Rambaldi with the park." (slightly adapted publisher's text, © Mack books, 2024)