In the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation, From an idea of the Trento Film Festival, the Mart and MUSE, together with the Festival itself, join forces and bring Sebastião Salgado’s major last exhibition project to Trentino. The exhibition is curated by Lélia Wanick Salgado, produced in collaboration with Contrasto and Studio Salgado with coordination by Gabriele Lorenzoni (Mart) and Luca Scoz (MUSE).
One of the world’s best-known artists, as well as photographer, activist and humanist, throughout his long career Sebastião Salgado has chronicled profound social, environmental and economic changes, giving voice to the last on the planet. In recent years he has taken hundreds of shots of one of the most striking natural environments and at the same time one of the most endangered ecosystems: that of the perennial snows.
In Rovereto and Trento, Ghiacciai will become a multi-venue exhibition for which Salgado has selected a series of shots, most of them previously unseen. The project is a unique opportunity to learn about and explore the artist’s poetics and, at the same time, offers the chance to address one of the most pressing issues of our time, that of climate change. In fact, the exhibition is part of a broader context: the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the proposal to declare 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. Since the first scientific monitoring in the 1960s, it has become clear that from decade to decade there may be a steady, dramatic reduction in volume and area of glaciers around the world, and some of these are already extinct. First of all, the disappearance of glaciers means the cultural loss of priceless vistas, dazzling in their majesty, capable of captivating generations of travellers, artists and poets. Secondly, glaciers are crucial to regulating the hydrological cycle and local and global climate; they are living life-giving entities; the drinking water supply of two billion people and two-thirds of the world’s irrigated agriculture depend on them.
The exhibition project consists of two complementary sections set up in two different museums whose specialties, art and science, correspond to the exhibition’s themes.
For the Mart in Rovereto, Salgado chose more than 50 large and ultra-large-format photographs of glaciers from around the world, while for the MUSE he designed a large site-specific installation in the spaces of the ‘Grande Vuoto [Great Void]’ that architect Renzo Piano envisioned as the beating heart of the museum. All taken in in Kluane Park, Canada, the photographs on display in Trento make up one large group.
The exhibition reinforces the Trento Film Festival’s commitment to defending the environment and natural ecosystems and enriches the content of the 73rd edition, scheduled to take place in Trento from 25 April to 4 May.
