Giulia Sale
La città ideale (The Ideal City)
9 November to 31 December 2025
Critique sheet
In La città ideale (The Ideal City) , artist Giulia Sale proposes a reflection on the crisis of the idea of the city as a harmonious space and symbol of civilisation. Her images construct a visual narrative in which the Renaissance ideal is confronted with the desolation of the present through a visual and photographic graft that takes place without overt shock.
Curator Mariolina Cosseddu writes about the exhibition: “In the infinite number of city plans that history has handed down to us, Giulia Sale chooses to revisit the projects of Filarete, architect and theorist of an ideal city that she named Sforzinda as a dedication to Francesco Sforza in the first half of the 15th century. To the eye they impose, with sublime elegance, the perfectly accomplished architecture of urban spaces conceived to reflect, in the harmony of their proportions, the very harmony of the civilisation for which they are intended. But as we accustom our eyes to reading the compositions that the artist invites us to explore, we discover the truth underlying the scenographic representations: that concept of historical and artistic ideality is a ferocious pretext for staging an equally ferocious contemporary reality: the ongoing destruction of a civilisation and a culture on the basis of a historical claim that is as senseless as it is inhuman”. The city proposed by Giulia Sale does not have a future, but it does have a past, devastated by the present.
Suspended in the centre of the room, over 120 Polaroids – natural elements and views, architecture, landscape fragments – depict natural landscapes and urban views, reflecting the artist’s dual interest in the built and natural environment. Through snapshot photography, recurrent in his research, the artist explores the value of visual information and its capacity to go beyond the mere recording of reality, restoring its intimate and conceptual dimension. The exhibition space thus becomes a poetic field in which the gaze questions the ephemeral nature of the image, the memory of the landscape hybridised between project and reality.
Biography
Giulia Sale was born in Sassari, where she lives and works. Her training was in photography, which she usually combines with installation. In 1989, with Enrico Puggioni and Gianni Ruggiu, she founded I FIORI BLU, with the aim of creating synergic relationships between personal and collective experiences. As a photographer, she was awarded a prize at the I Biennale dei giovani in Sassari in 1986, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s she was an active part of Sassari’s young art movement. Interested in the problems of identity, she has long conducted a systematic series of research on the female body, on the symbols of western culture, on otherness and absence. But also on the urban and natural landscape, the subject of investigation into the value of visual information and the intimate and conceptual essence of a poetic space. Exhibitions include participation in “Sacre sponde” (1992), Trevi Flash A. M. (1997), the solo exhibition at the Casa Manno Museum in Alghero (2019). She is part of the group show at the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Sassari (2022) and ‘Peer to Peer – artistic correspondences’ in the Molineddu Park (2025) and the protagonist of the exhibition ‘Tre donne intorno al cor’ (Three women around the heart) at Su Palatu di Villanova Monteleone (2025).
Photographs
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