The exhibition was part of Archipelago, the fifth edition of PhMuseum Days. The festival is curated by the PhMuseum platform under the artistic direction of Giuseppe Oliverio. The theme of the archipelago stems from the reflections of Massimo Cacciari, in particular his 2005 book. It suggests a way of thinking suited to a fragmented age without clear boundaries, in which aesthetic and conceptual differences coexist within an open system. For 2026, the festival chose as its main venue the former Ospedale dei Bastardini, the historic complex on Via D’Azeglio recently reopened under new management. It hosted seven solo exhibitions: alongside Clavarino, the exhibiting artists were Max Pinckers, Allegra Baggio Corradi, Jonah Samson, Daniel Martínez, Robin Alysha Clemens and Francisco Cantón.

Italia o Italia is the project that brought Clavarino to wider attention. It was made between 2010 and 2014. Rather than documenting Italy, the work invents one: photographs taken in different places across the peninsula are assembled to form an imaginary country. The starting point is biographical. Clavarino had been living abroad and, on returning to Italy, found himself seeing it with new eyes.

The images form a path of shadows, symbols, urban vistas and human figures, in which the country’s monumental past is set against the present. The underlying theme is the weight of history on the Italian landscape. Ruins and monuments seem to bear down on the present, as a sign of a country unable to break free from its past greatness. Yet Clavarino is not polemical. He adopts an affectionate irony, one that only someone with an intimate bond with their subject can afford, and charges the stillness of the landscape with new allegories.

The individual images are still, almost suspended. Placed side by side, they create a network of resemblances and contrasts that remains deliberately enigmatic. The places have no names, and neither do the people who pass through them. The result is a labyrinth of fragments, silhouettes and glimpses, where the real destination is the photographer’s response to what he encounters. The photographs carry many literary and pictorial references: Calvino’s cities, Montale’s poetry, De Chirico’s empty spaces, Morandi’s palette. For the author, they are small cracks in everyday life that allow us to glimpse what makes a place unique.

The project was first published as a book by Akina in 2014 and was reissued by Void in 2024. For this edition, the images were scanned from the original chromogenic prints and printed in the darkroom by the author himself.

The exhibition at the Bastardini marks a return. The same work had already been shown in the city in 2016 at Spazio Labò, Bologna’s centre for photography. Presenting it again ten years later, within a festival devoted to archipelagic thinking, gives it new meaning: Clavarino’s Italy appears precisely as a collection of visual islands, distinct yet connected.