The Searchlights: When Young People Shine a Spotlight on the World (and Themselves)

 

 

Volterra and IED together for a major exhibition celebrating alabaster

 

On April 10th at the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, eighteen photographic works by IED students will become a stage for a collective reflection open to the public.

There are events that make me feel old, in a good way – the kind where “old” means I've lived long enough to recognize when something is done with care and intention. The Searchlights, the public portfolio review that took place on April 10th at the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, is one of these.

Let's talk about the second chapter of I would like to tell you, a three-year project by IED — European Design Institute — created in collaboration with the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin. The underlying idea is both simple and powerful: to present the work of students from the three-year Photography programs at three campuses (Turin, Milan, Rome) to professional eyes — curators, gallerists, journalists — and to do so in public, with all the risk and vitality that this entails.

Eighteen photographic projects, each enclosed in a box designed by the students of Visual Communication Design at IED Florence. There is something almost poetic in this box as a container of visions: something closed that opens, something physical that holds images. I couldn't resist thinking about it.

From 3:00 PM to 6:30 PM, the works were displayed on tables that gradually became true stages for dialogue. The artists moved through the space, engaging those who were looking, inviting them to connect with the images. It wasn't a static exhibition, therefore, but something more alive and uninhibited—a forced conversation in the best sense, the kind that compels you to say what you see, what you feel, what you don't understand.

The themes addressed cut precisely through the fault lines of this generation: the ecological and climate crisis, the relationship between humans and nature, and power dynamics within social and cultural systems. But also—and I'll pause here for a moment, because it's the part I find most interesting—the existential conditions of contemporaneity: loneliness, individual faith, mental health, housing precarity, that generational suspension that hasn't yet found a precise name. And then the new forms of memory in the digital age, which is a theme that comes to mind every time I open a photo archive and wonder what will remain of all this.

The eighteen protagonists — Riccardo Falbo, Penelope Siria Meneghetti, Micol Naretti, Eugenia Re, Eleonora Sanna, and Sofia Valabrega for Turin; Alice Antonetti, Valeria Arrigo, Guglielmo Benassi, Nicole Pagliuca, Francesca Paoletta, and Thomas Voltan for Milan; Leonardo Bandini, Linda Chionne, Daria Giovanardi, Arianna Iannone, Giulia Leo, and Matteo Rosadi for Rome — do not attempt to simplify. And this in itself is an achievement. Contradictions, vulnerabilities, desires, and tensions emerge without being resolved, and I like to think of it as a conscious choice.

The exhibition is curated by Carlotta Cattaneo (IED Milan), Daria Scolamacchia (IED Rome), and Giulia Ticozzi (IED Turin). The visual identity is the work of Camilla Brandi, Marta Maioli, Hari Santinelli, Olha Serpionova, Angelina Strizhakova, and Maria Tedesco, students of IED Florence.

The Searchlights is part of the EXPOSED Torino Photo Festival program. The event has already taken place, but the works and the names remain – and are worth keeping an eye on.