METRONOM

MO’DINNA MO’DINNA (I wanna go back home) is the evocative title of a work that questions the notion of place through photography and the practice of travel. Antonio Rovaldi constructs a visual and mental narrative that begins with the Emilian topos of the Via Emilia, evoking the visual and narrative legacy of two foundational figures in the Italian landscape imagination: Gianni Celati and Luigi Ghirri. Their poetics—rooted in minimal drifts, peripheral visions, and attention to the ordinary—resonates in Rovaldi’s project like a basso continuo, guiding both gesture and itinerary.

In 2016, invited by the Fotografia Europea festival, Rovaldi accepted the challenge of exploring the Po Valley landscape along the Via Emilia, focusing on the Parma-Modena stretch. But the journey does not unfold linearly. At the time living in the United States, the artist chose to reverse the direction: he began in the American Modena, an unusual namesake located in Utah, and only later arrived at the Emilian Modena. The distance between these two cities—geographically far apart but linked by a curious toponymic overlap—becomes a narrative device, an interplay of real and imagined coordinates, linguistic and biographical sedimentations.

The name “Mo’dinna,” a phonetic distortion of Modena in the American accent, activates a linguistic short-circuit that opens the way to reflections on diasporic identity, migratory heritage, and the landscape as a mirror of memory. Rovaldi physically traverses places, but what he documents is never mere testimony. His exploration feeds on uncertainty, drifts, and fragments: among local legends (a Chinese cook shouting a call, a migrant worker renaming his construction site), and abandoned geographies now resembling ghost towns, space transforms into a text to be read and rewritten.

The photographic corpus—sixty black-and-white shots arranged in a strict sequence—unfolds like a visual score, accompanied by a sound track that expands its atmosphere. This is not mere representation, but an attempt to relate to what appears: a “closeness” that takes form. Rovaldi does not photograph the landscape; he listens to it, crosses it, inhabits it. His images do not illustrate: they evoke, capturing the slippage between the visible and the imagined, between belonging and distance.

Antonio Rovaldi (Parma, 1975) lives and works in Milan. He graduated in 2000 in Art and Photography at NABA in Milan, where he studied under artists such as Hidetoshi Nagasawa and Mario Cresci. His practice investigates the perception of landscape through photography, video, sculpture, and sound installation. A recurring element in his research is the representation of distance—both physical and mental—between real and literary places, collective spaces, and autobiographical memories. In 2006, he won the New York Prize from Columbia University, and in 2009 he was an Artist in Residence at ISCP in Brooklyn. Since 2017, he has been developing the project ‘Cler’ in his Milan studio, hosting exhibitions with a particular focus on the relationship between photography, film, and sound.

Press Kit: link

MO’DINNA MO’DINNA (I wanna go back home)
From 17 dicembre 2024 to 21 febbraio 2025
Metronom, Via carteria 10, 41121, Modena