Curated by Angela Madesani

The exhibition can be visited from 9 September to 30 November 2012

On 8 September 2012, the Michela Rizzo Gallery in Venice hosts, for the first time, an exhibition by Francesco Jodice (Naples 1967) curated by Angela Madesani. His research investigates the mutations in contemporary social landscapes by comparing similar phenomena in different parts of the world through the use of photographs, films, maps, texts and installations.

Jodice, whose recent work focuses on geopolitical issues by examining the most recent "clash of civilizations", has participated in Documenta Kassel, the Venice Biennale, the Bienal de São Paulo, and the ICP Triennial of Photography and Video New York. His works have been exhibited at the Tate Modern in London, at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Castello di Rivoli, at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, at the MAMbo in Bologna, and have recently been the protagonist of an important exhibition solo exhibition at the Prado Museum in Madrid, the first dedicated to a contemporary Italian artist.

Photographs from What We Want are on display in Venice, a project that began in 1995 and is still ongoing. It is an observatory composed of photographs and texts on the modification of the landscape seen as the projection of people's desires. The geopolitical texts will be reported on the walls of the gallery by a group of children from the Family Card of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

The project archive includes works carried out in about 150 metropolises on the 5 continents since 1995. Jodice writes: “Today we can identify a new community of pioneers accustomed to thinking of the city as a place detached from its own history, modifiable and willing to host the importation of models and suggestions from different cultures. These conditions have developed our sensitivity to project our will into the environment, giving life to a landscape as a projection of our own desires. "

Accompanied by a gallery made up of frames of video images, the video The Morocco Affair is presented. The project was carried out on the outskirts of Oujda, a city located thirty kilometres inside the Moroccan African coast on the Mediterranean, on the border with Algeria. The film, which collects eighty-two small films of Moroccan houses, was shot in the nights between 17 and 23 March 2004 with infrared footage, a week after the well-known attacks on Madrid railway stations. The houses, all second homes, built by the owners with the proceeds of the work carried out in the various European countries of emigration, mainly belong to MRE (Marocains Résidants à l'Etranger) mostly from Belgium, Germany, Holland, France and Spain.

The three films belonging to the Citytellers project are shown on the main wall of the gallery. The film series is a real laboratory on the future of cities. Citytellers is in fact a moving sensor in the landscapes of geopolitical mutation. The project currently consists of 3 works/films: Sao Paulo_Citytellers (2006), Aral_Citytellers, and Dubai_Citytellers (2010) each linked to as many themes: the phenomena of self-organization in a city-region of 18 million inhabitants such as Paulista; the survival of the species in post-humanistic conditions in the Kazakh and Uzbek regions of the Mongolian steppe that once hosted the planet's fourth inland sea, the Aral Sea; the strategy for the construction of new forms of slavery in the city-state of which the sociologist Nicholas McGeehan says: "Don't think of Dubai as a city, think of Dubai as a corporation".

On the occasion of the exhibition in the gallery there will also be the recent volume by Francesco Jodice What we want (Dalai Editore 2011), edited by Angela Madesani. What we want (1995 - in progress)