Luca Santese & Marco P.Valli

Since 2018, Santese and Valli have been systematically and authoritatively documenting a series of independent real-time publications on the main events and key figures of the Italian political landscape.
Many photographs from the “Realpolitik” project have appeared on the covers of newspapers and magazines, including Time Magazine, L’Espresso, La Repubblica, Internazionale, and L’Essenziale, among others.
The exhibition “Realpolitik 2018-2023” includes 34 large-format fine-art prints that allow us to delve into the new iconography of Italian politics, fashioned for a substantial part in the last years by the authors Santese and Valli. Mainly, this new iconography consists of a subversion of the representation techniques employed by Italian politics, primarily through meticulous and programmatic use of social networks, resulting in a continuous shift from representative democracy towards a democracy of representation.

Bio: Luca Santese and Marco P. Valli, who have been active in the contemporary photography landscape over the last decade, are co-authors of “Realpolitik;” a photographic project that offers critical and satirical reflections on the iconography of communication and propaganda characterizing Italy’s politics today. The artists are members of the Cesura Collective, an independent group of Italian photographers dedicated to promoting and supporting photojournalism, documentary photography, and experimental photography.