NUOVO GRAND TOUR
ANDREA VALZANIA
SEASON 2025
Andrea Valzania is a young photographer based in the rural countryside of Romagna, Italy, with a background in industrial product design.
The project developed during the residency marks a natural evolution of his photographic research, grounded in an attentive and inquisitive gaze toward the landscape and the elements that shape it. The distinctive context of Boisbuchet, where nature, architecture, and design coexist allowed the artist to further expand an investigation he has been pursuing over time, in which heterogeneous elements converge into a fragmented yet cohesive visual narrative. The photographs articulate an authorial vision formed during the delicate transition from summer to autumn. Meadows, woodlands, architectural structures, design objects, and portraits of volunteers and fellow residents become protagonists within a narrative that does not aim to faithfully reproduce reality, but rather to evoke a landscape and a fragment of time.
The photographic process becomes an opportunity to reflect both on the specific qualities of the place and on the intrinsic properties of the medium itself. Rather than pursuing the “decisive moment,” the work turns its attention to what photographer Guido Guidi describes as “cose da nulla” (“things of little importance”)—minor elements that quietly structure the contemporary landscape. Marginal aspects, typically relegated to the background, emerge here as the core of a narrative that does not seek psychological interpretation, but instead attempts, through the inherent flatness of the photographic image, to bring traces of lived experience to the surface. The project unfolds through the sequencing of images, shaped by the rhythm and intervals that both connect and separate them. Produced with an analog medium-format camera, the work is grounded in a slow and contemplative approach.
The final presentation took the form of a site-specific exhibition inside the barn. On one side, a projection presented the entire body of work as though leafing through the pages of a hypothetical book prototype. On the other, an installation conceived by the artist composed of six wooden plinths, each supporting a photographic print framed with a mat board and glass offered a selection drawn from the larger body of work. Arranged frontally in two groups of three, the six images formed two imaginary triptychs that faced one another and entered into dialogue, inviting viewers to move through the space. A key curatorial decision was not to display the photographs framed and hung on the wall, as is customary in galleries and museums, but rather to present them resting horizontally. This arrangement echoes the artist’s own posture at the moment of exposure, the same inclination with which he looks into the waist-level viewfinder before translating reality into an image.
All of this was made possible thanks to the energetic and stimulating atmosphere that characterizes Boisbuchet, a context that fosters exchange and the further development of artistic practice.
Photos : Manon Arrougé