Vincenzo Castella. Timeless Archaeology

From June 5th to October 3rd, 2026, seven years after the artist’s last exhibition at the gallery, BUILDING GALLERY presents “Vincenzo Castella. Timeless Archaeology”, an extensive solo exhibition curated by Marco Scotini.
The exhibition, which unfolds across the three exhibition floors of BUILDING GALLERY, brings together for the first time a cohesive body of around sixty large and medium format photographic works, offering a comprehensive and layered reading of the artist’s research on the industrial landscape from the 1980s to the present. Through a selection of previously unseen works spanning four decades of activity, the exhibition conveys the continuity and distinctiveness of Castella’s research, exploring the processes of transformation in the landscape and visual memory.

Vincenzo Castella (Naples, 1952), a central figure in contemporary Italian photography, established himself on the international scene in the 1980s, emerging in the context of the landmark 1984 exhibition Viaggio in Italia. Within this framework, his work takes the form of a multifaceted exploration of the landscape, developed through a progressive expansion of his fields of interest. Images of urban landscapes—including the well-known “coralline” portraits of cities, begun in 1998—alternate with views of industrial scenes, as in the series of vertical photographs taken in Italy and exhibited on the first floor of BUILDING GALLERY. These are chapters of that “underground journey” into prohibited areas, first identified by Paolo Costantini in 1991, leading up to a more recent focus on the natural landscape, particularly the botanical landscape.

“Vincenzo Castella. Timeless Archaeology” invites viewers to interpret this extraordinary body of photographic work through the lens of its own temporality. All these examples of oversized machinery characterized by fluorescent light, displayed at BUILDING GALLERY from the ground floor to the second floor in various formats, offer a truly archaeological approach that highlights the specific nature of memory that informs this body of work, as well as the rest of his oeuvre. It is not, therefore, a dimension tied to the past—precisely because these industrial landscapes belong fully to the present—but rather a condition that manifests itself, by its very nature, as already calcified, crystallized, fossilized.
It is precisely this aspect of “calcification” that gives these images a suspended, “timeless” quality, even though all the industrial plants depicted—from ILVA in Taranto to Italsider in Naples, and the large Ansaldo and Breda factories—are tied to a specific history and chronological context.