Alongside the artist Pietro Bologna, the gallery will take part in the official programme of Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, the leading international photography festival since 1970.
Pietro Bologna's series Elegìa (2025), presented at the 2025 edition of a ppr oc he, the Parisian salon dedicated to experimentation in the photographic image, and later at our gallery in Milan in 2026, will now be exhibited in Arles at the Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation as part of the group exhibiIon "Come Together".
In the face of the intensifying fragmentation dynamics currently sweeping the world, the artists featured in "Come Together" explore the many forms taken by the fundamental human experience of connection.
In particular, Pietro Bologna will be featured in the second section of "Come Together", realized in collaboration with FotoHaus Arles 2026 and entitled "Making Family". Here family is interrogated as a shifting constellation where biological filiations, chosen kinships, transmitted memories and identities in the making intersect.
Pascale Giffard: "The family becomes a space where legacies and filiations shape identities without ever fixing them. Pietro Bologna thus transforms a family journey to Sicily into a poetic quest, where land becomes in turn a matrix of belonging."
Elegìa (2025) was inspired by a family trip to Sicily. As well as capturing private moments, Pietro Bologna photographed the artistic, cultural and natural heritage of Sicily. The result was a series called Mio malgrado (2018), which was printed using a technique that was popular in the United States in the 1960s called "gum print" (lithography on paper). Elegìa consists of 24 matrices used to create the gum prints of Mio malgrado.
The backlighting of the matrices highlights traces of processing and wear on the paper, such as fractures, cuts and holes, which emphasise the resilience of the material. However, they also demonstrate that the invisible, the untouchable and the inaudible are fundamental to experience (Merleau-Ponty).
