Alessandro Vicario — Mappe arboree / Tree Maps

“Mappe arboree”, the photographic series Alessandro Vicario began in 2015 and has continued to develop and transform ever since, is presented from 12 April to 30 May 2023 at the new exhibition space dedicated to contemporary photography, Lab 1930, Via Mantova 21, Milan.

The exhibition — curated by Elena Carotti and featuring eleven photographic works, four of them previously unseen, taken between 2015 and 2021 using different photographic techniques, both analogue and digital — reflects on trees and, in particular, on their outermost layer, which plays a fundamental role in our planet’s ecosystem and affects all our lives: bark.

The series “Mappe arboree” — imaginary “territories” and utopian “cities” inhabited by different forms of animal and plant life, most of them tiny yet equally important to the balance of biodiversity and the ecosystem itself — began in the summer of 2015, when Vicario photographed the bark of the centuries-old plane tree in Milan’s Giardino della Guastalla.

“It once stood in the little garden of the primary school I attended in Via Francesco Sforza, the first school in Italy to adopt Steiner’s educational approach. In the reassuring, protective shade of that plane tree, I used to play with my classmates. That tree watched us grow up.”

Alessandro Vicario decided to retain the black border of the slide from the first photograph in every image, including the digital ones, to preserve the series’ aesthetic coherence while introducing a sense of estrangement through the repeated frame numbers, 7 and 8, from that first photograph in the Giardino della Guastalla. The border is the distinctive mark of the analogue frame he made in 2015 with the old Hasselblad 500 CM his father lent him to photograph the garden’s plane tree.

The photographs exhibited at Lab 1930 are the result of a journey through Italy and Kenya, where, in January 2017, Alessandro Vicario joined the first Italian mission to learn about the activities that Action for Children in Conflict (AfCiC), a Kenyan non-governmental organisation, has conducted since 2004 in Thika, 45 km north-east of Nairobi.

Alongside the eleven “Maps”, the exhibition presents a reproduction of “Senza Titolo. Milano, parco delle Cave”, a photographic work with subsequent manual colour retouching, made in 1978 by his father Ennio, the well-known photographer who recently died and to whom Alessandro dedicates this exhibition.

The exhibition Mappe arboree is accompanied by a dedicated photobook (Edizioni Lab 1930), in a limited edition of seventy copies signed by the artist, containing a selection of eighteen “Maps” from the series, five of them previously unseen.

Thirty copies of the photobook also contain two Fine Art prints by Alessandro Vicario selected from the Kenyan “Maps” and not reproduced in the photobook, together with a Fine Art print of Ennio Vicario’s work displayed in the exhibition. Each work is issued in an edition of 10 copies, numbered and signed by the artist.

At the opening, visitors will be able to taste the confectionery creations of Milan’s artisan workshop “Solbiati Cioccolato”.

Exhibition opening hours

By appointment every Tuesday and Thursday, from 3 to 6 p.m.

During the Fuorisalone, from Tuesday 18 to Friday 21 April, from 3 to 6 p.m.

Special opening days: Saturday 15 and Sunday 16 April — Saturday 27 and Sunday 28 May, from 3 to 6 p.m.

Opening Wednesday 12 April, 6–8 p.m., free admission