Texas Trigger
(2024-2025)
di Luca Santese, Marco P. Valli / CESURA
Progetto fotografico che esplora l’identità dell’America profonda,attraverso un viaggio in Texas compiuto dagli autori nel 2024, durante la campagna presidenziale, il lavoro affronta temi cruciali della società statunitense contemporanea — come le armi, i diritti civili, l’immigrazione e le disuguaglianze sociali — offrendo un ritratto crudo e visionario dell’America di oggi.
Nel maggio 2024, Luca Santese e Marco P. Valli hanno intrapreso un viaggio attraverso il Texas, nel pieno della campagna per le elezioni presidenziali statunitensi. In poco più di un mese hanno percorso circa 5.000 miglia, documentando un’ampia varietà di luoghi nello stato: città, periferie, aree rurali e industriali, fino alle zone di confine.
Artribune
Internazionale
(Texas Trigger Book Cover)
BUY HERE
(ENG) A photographic project that explores the identity of deep America, through a journey across Texas undertaken by the authors in 2024, during the presidential election campaign. The work addresses key issues of contemporary U.S. society — such as firearms, civil rights, immigration, and social inequality — offering a raw and visionary portrait of modern America.
In May 2024, Luca Santese and Marco P. Valli embarked on a journey across Texas at the height of the U.S. presidential election campaign. Over a little more than a month, they drove approximately 5,000 miles—documenting a wide range of environments across the state: cities, suburbs, rural and industrial areas, and the borderlands.
(Selected photographs)
(ITA) Oggi il Texas rappresenta uno dei punti di osservazione privilegiati per comprendere alcune dinamiche cruciali che plasmano la società americana contemporanea: la politica migratoria, la proliferazione delle armi da fuoco, le tensioni politiche e culturali e il continuo scontro tra ideali conservatori e movimenti progressisti.
(ENG) Today, Texas stands as one of the key vantage points from which to observe and understand some crucial dynamics shaping contemporary American society: immigration policy, the proliferation of firearms, political and cultural tensions, and the ongoing clash between conservative ideals and progressive movements.
(Selected spreads from the Texas Trigger book)
(ITA) Il libro è diviso in capitoli che seguono la cronologia degli eventi e degli incontri del viaggio. Tuttavia, non è presente un indice che li separi in modo schematico: l’opera si sviluppa invece come una sequenza fotografica continua, in cui ogni parte confluisce nella successiva attraverso un innesco visivo, una soglia che segnala il passaggio da un capitolo all’altro.
Oltre a rimandare al meccanismo di un’arma da fuoco o al dispositivo che attiva i flash della fotocamera degli autori, il trigger è anche inteso come un attivatore che disorienta e suscita una risposta emotiva.
(ENG) The book is divided into chapters that follow the chronology of events and encounters from the trip. However, there is no index to separate them schematically—instead, the work unfolds as a continuous photographic sequence, where each part flows into the next through a visual trigger: a threshold that signals the passage from one chapter to another. Besides referring to the mechanism of a firearm or the device that activates the authors’ camera flashes, the trigger is also meant as an activator that disorients and provokes an emotional response.
(Selected spreads from the Texas Trigger book)
(ITA)La mostra Texas Trigger presenta 33 opere per un totale di 71 fotografie C-Print. L’allestimento, composto da 18 cornici in formato 54 × 74 cm e 15 cornici in formato 48 × 74 cm, costruisce un percorso capace di restituire la complessità visiva e simbolica del Texas contemporaneo. Questa struttura espositiva introduce a una nuova iconografia dell’America profonda, che gli autori hanno indagato e registrato durante un viaggio attraverso uno degli Stati più influenti e contraddittori del Paese. Texas Trigger mette in scena le tensioni che attraversano il tessuto sociale americano — politica, identità, firearms, migrazioni e immaginario culturale — sovvertendo le forme con cui l’America tenta di rappresentare sé stessa, in un’epoca segnata dalla comunicazione strategica e dalla costruzione programmata della propria immagine pubblica.
(ENG)The Texas Trigger exhibition presents 33 works comprising a total of 71 C-Print photographs. The display—featuring 18 pieces measuring 54 × 74 cm and 15 pieces measuring 48 × 74 cm—creates an immersive pathway that conveys the visual and symbolic complexity of contemporary Texas. This exhibition structure introduces a new iconography of deep America, investigated and documented by the authors during a journey across one of the country’s most influential and contradictory states. Texas Trigger brings into focus the tensions running through the American social fabric—politics, identity, firearms, migration, and cultural imagery—subverting the ways in which America attempts to represent itself in an era defined by strategic communication and the programmed construction of public image.
(Texas Trigger Installation shots Exhibition in Genova, 2025)
(ITA) Valli e Santese sovvertono il meccanismo di falsa uguaglianza tra elettore ed eletto, tra votante e votato, tra consumatore ed erogatore di servizi politici. Interrompono la catena di comando della comunicazione politica proprio nel suo volere apparire autentica, semplice, diretta, disvelando attraverso nuove immagini il nugolo di artifici che reggono il sistema della rappresentazione politica in Italia.
(ENG) Valli and Santese subvert the mechanism of false equality between the voter and the elected, between the voter and the voted, between the consumer and the provider of political services. They interrupt the chain of command of political communication precisely in its desire to appear authentic, simple, and direct, revealing through new images the swarm of artifices that sustain the system of political representation in Italy.
Realpolitik
2018-2025
Progetto fotografico satirico
sull’iconografia politica italiana.
di Luca Santese, Marco P. Valli / CESURA
(ITA) Luca Santese e Marco P. Valli, attivi nell’ultimo decennio nel panorama della fotografia contemporanea con progetti come Found Photos in Detroit (Arcara/Santese) e Bakeca (Adamo/Valli), sono co-autori di Realpolitik, recente progetto fotografico di critica e riflessione satirica sull’iconografia di propaganda e comunicazione politica italiana contemporanea.
Dal 2018 gli autori lavorano alla costruzione di una documentazione sistematica ed autoriale attraverso una serie di pubblicazioni indipendenti in tempo reale sui principali eventi e protagonisti del panorama politico italiano. Si vedano Boys Boys Boys, Popolopopolo, Lega Nord Party, MoVimento Lento, Mask off, Tik Tok Tak e Homo Silvio, divulgati da Cesura Publish, casa editrice indipendente del collettivo fotografico Cesura.
Artribune
Time Magazine cover
(Time Magazine Cover - Matteo Salvini)
Realpolitik 2018-2023: a Satirical photographic
project on
Italian political iconography.
(ENG) Luca Santese and Marco P. Valli, active in the last decade in the contemporary photography scene with projects such as Found Photos in Detroit (Arcara/Santese) and Bakeca (Adamo/Valli), are co-authors of Realpolitik, a recent photographic project of criticism and satirical reflection on the iconography of contemporary Italian political propaganda and communication.
Since 2018, the authors have been working on the construction of a systematic and authorial documentation through a series of real-time independent publications on the main events and protagonists of the Italian political scene. See Boys Boys Boys, Popolopopolo, Lega Nord Party, MoVimento Lento, Mask off, Tik Tok Tak, and Homo Silvio, disseminated by Cesura Publish, the independent publishing house of the Cesura photographic collective.
(The first five volumes of Realpolitik fanzine series)
(ITA) Diverse immagini che compongono il progetto sono state pubblicate sulle copertine di giornali e riviste come Time Magazine, L’Espresso, La Repubblica, Internazionale e L’Essenziale. Gli autori hanno inoltre pubblicato un libro fotografico interamente dedicato all’allora ministro dell’Interno Matteo Salvini (Il Corpo del Capitano - 2020).
(Selection of magazine covers)
(ENG) Several images that make up the project have been published on the covers of newspapers and magazines such as Time Magazine, L'Espresso, La Repubblica, Internazionale, and L'Essenziale. The authors have also published a photographic book entirely dedicated to the then Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini (Link: The Body of the Captain - 2020).
(The last three volumes of Realpolitik fanzine series)
(ITA)La mostra Realpolitik 2018-2023 è composta numerosi stendardi e gigantografie e da 30 stampe fine art di grande formato. Questo permette di immergersi nella nuova iconografia della politica italiana, che gli autori hanno contribuito in modo determinante a plasmare. Si tratta di una sovversione delle modalità con cui la politica ha cercato di rappresentare sé stessa, soprattutto tramite l’uso oculato e programmatico dei social network, in una inarrestabile transizione dalla democrazia rappresentativa verso una democrazia della rappresentazione.
(ENG) The exhibition Realpolitik 2018-2023 consists of numerous banners and large-scale prints, as well as 30 large-format fine art prints. This allows for an immersive experience in the new iconography of Italian politics, to which the authors have contributed significantly in shaping. It represents a subversion of the ways in which politics has tried to represent itself, especially through the deliberate and programmatic use of social networks, in an unstoppable transition from representative democracy to a democracy of representation.
(Installation shots)
(ITA) Valli e Santese sovvertono il meccanismo di falsa uguaglianza tra elettore ed eletto, tra votante e votato, tra consumatore ed erogatore di servizi politici. Interrompono la catena di comando della comunicazione politica proprio nel suo volere apparire autentica, semplice, diretta, disvelando attraverso nuove immagini il nugolo di artifici che reggono il sistema della rappresentazione politica in Italia.
(ENG) Valli and Santese subvert the mechanism of false equality between the voter and the elected, between the voter and the voted, between the consumer and the provider of political services. They interrupt the chain of command of political communication precisely in its desire to appear authentic, simple, and direct, revealing through new images the swarm of artifices that sustain the system of political representation in Italy.
Mütter
The Kingdom of Forms
Jergon, Berlin
Photographs by Luca Santese
Curated by Nicola Patruno
MÜTTER, Luca Santese’s first solo show in Germany is hosted and curated by JERGON, an art hub located in Berlin’s cultural heart of Kreuzberg. The space is dedicated to the promotion of experimental photography and a center for independent research.
The exhibition itinerary unfolds in three spaces, each representing the constituent stages of Santese’s artist practice, which has been questioning the mimesis of the photographic image for 15 years by means of an ongoing comparison and association with archetypes and themes belonging to the history of classic and contemporary art.
The artwork on display is drawn from the following series: ‘Found Photos in Detroit’, ‘Festa’ and ‘Errors’, leading up to a metamorphic dialogue between abstraction and figuration, the historical and the archetypical, the realist and the visionary.
Complete catalogue ENG ITA DE
Artribune article
Photography-now list
Exibart article
The exhibition itinerary begins from the rejection of photography as merely mimetic, mechanical reproduction of reality, and even less so in the case of documentary photography.
This happens to be the starting point for ‘Found Photos in Detroit’, published together with Arianna Arcara – with whom Santese founded the collective Cesura – in 2012. The images from this series are in fact archival documents that time and weathering have altered, undisclosing new characteristics of the documents themselves and distancing the subjects they portray from reality only at first glance.
The passing of time, on the contrary, together with the artists’ intervention, lets new truths otherwise concealed emerge from each individual document. ‘Found Photos in Detroit’ constitutes an archaeology of the documentary image, a procedure that dismantles the mimetic status of photography, thus opening up the possibility of its authentically artistic purpose
(Sado, Detroit 2009-2010, Found Photos in Detroit)
This body of work, starting out from a strictly documentary medium, casts light on the need to emancipate photography from mimesis as the only possible condition for it to access the art realm. Moreover, this condition grants the artwork the essential strength to lead the spectator to question their own ordinary world view. Santese’s work reveals the deceit of the artistic image as well as its absolute necessity. JERGON’s display of Santese’s body of work is marked by well-recognizable phases of his research. In a cyclical time, albeit never the same, the artist approaches diverse subject and creates images that dispute ordinary appearance. In the series ‘Sado’ the ordinary nature of the human body is called into question. Depicted in borderline situations that are achieved through pain and constriction, the body reveals sides that must be necessarily repressed in everyday life.
(Errors, Festa)
The ‘Festa’ cycle is a mediation point between interiority and exteriority, a mirror, a prism between subject and object, between time and history, the soul and the world. The presence of archetypes throughout this series becomes increasingly explicit and leads the viewer on to the ‘world of Mothers’ from which the exhibition title stems.
It is the world of ‘forms’ –of all forms possible–, a hyperuranium too bright to be let into without mediation, without a shield or a guide. They are the omnipotent forms from which everything in the world springs, where not even a God can take the lead, as it is reminded in Goethes’ Faust. The passage cannot happen without errors, though.
The ‘Errors’ series is made up by a number of works arising from the study of a mistake occurred in the digital production of an image. The artistic reworking of the photographic error can claim a century-long tradition and constitutes an underground current of photographic research at least from Lázló Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray onwards. Santese’s interpretation of the digital error molds new forms and enhances its fertility by depicting subjects ranging from human to nonhuman, from landscapes to actual sculptural works.
(New photographs)
Along the same lines of biological evolution, replication and selection mistakes stand at the core of change and development, they give life to new ‘shapes’: as in biology new life forms and species are born, so in Santese’s art new procreating shapes, archetypes and myths are generated.
Each phase transition is thus an evolution, a movement that requires the construction of a new language, rebelling against those expressive norms that have become sterile and crystallized. Only in this way can one plunge –together with Faust– in the realm of the Mothers: the old shapes implode and give ado to a new kaos that is then arranged in new shapes, a new kosmos regulated by new internal laws, of which the author takes conscience and sets free through actual new art.
Nicola Patruno
(Opening event and Installation shots, June 2023)
Found Photos
in Detroit
By Arianna Arcara, Luca Santese
In 2009 and 2010 Arianna Arcara & Luca Santese made trips to Detroit not to photograph but to gather discarded images found outside the countless deserted buildings.
The project is an informal archive of hundreds images from the 1970s and 1990s, when the decline of the city was beginning. They appear to have been taken by the Police or other state authorities as evidence of various crimes, accidents, suspect and victims, mostly in poor neighbourhoods.
Abandoned to the heat, cold and damp the photos have begun to discolour and decay. In this condition they too become traces of two historical moments, the first recorded by the photos as images, the second recorded by the photos as fragile material object.
Anonymes - Le Bal Space
Little brown Mushroom
American Suburxb X
(2010, Le Bal Space, Paris - Exhibition Poster)
In addition Found Photos in Detroit may also turn out to be testament to a last moment when such photographic images were actually produced as physical objects.
In the future the discovery of found photographs may well be a matter of recovering them fromn discarded digital hard-drives, CD’s and old computers.
Given the veneration of the amateur image in contemporary culture it is not surprising that photographers and artists have become acutely aware that vernacular snapshot may have a plainspoken immediacy that can be more forceful than their own images (almost any found photo has a degree of enigma and pathos about it, particularly a damaged one).
But there are risks in simply re-presenting found images, abstracting their apparent naivetè into an emotional clichè. Arcara and Santese’s methodical yet speculative assembly of these found photos into subcategories balances the easy sentimentality of each images against the intellectual process of editing and ordering, asking the viewer to consider the greater whole from which each is derived(...)
David Campany
The project Found Photos in Detroit was born from the idea of a reportage concerning the city of Detroit. The project wanted originally to portrait the current abandon and decandence of Detroit, as consequence of the well known socio-economical crisis that hit the city from the middle Seventies. During the first trip, in December 2009, many photos and documents were found close to several decadent public buildings, such as police stations, schools, tribunals and hospitals. This material, even if at that time was just random, revealed immediatly a stunning documentary potential.
(Selected Frames)
At the same time, the primal will of documentation through a reportage faded into a new challenge of reconstructive editing. This material was able to show us that a photo-reportage in Detroit would it meant just an ex post operation, unable to give justice to the developement of the decay: it appeared also clear that a work on the already existing photographic material would have been able to exhibit the phenomen from the inner side.
(FPID Exhibition Wall, Le Bal Space, Paris, 2010)
In Detroit were found many folders containing various documents referable to police archives: not only photos, therefore, but also threatening letters and other types of evidence. Besides this kind of document, nevertheless, were col- lected also photos and files connected with family and daily life.
The collected images are in total 1000 but the first exhibition body of work consists of an editing of 200. The fundamental editing criterion was to con- sider all the materials as they basically are: documents. Doesn’t matter if criminal or civil, public or private. Every single piece is and evidence by itself.
In addition to the 250 images that made the exhibition, hence being edited and framed, the col- lection of rescued material ranges over 800 further photographs, not awarded to be displayed yet. This section of archive have been subsequently scanned, and new sequences of photographs have been arranged for future exhibitions to be held.
(Found Photos in Detroit - Book Cover and Pages - Cesura Publish, 2012)
In 2012 the autors published the Found Photos in Detroit book. The book has collected seven nominations as the best photographic book of the year and was selected by Martin Parr and Garry Badger for the series: Photobook: A History Vol III, which collects the 200 best books after the second world war.
(Photobook: A History Vol III)
The exhibition of the original photographs has been enriched with a selection of 11 enlargements. The choice by the authors to carry out this operation lies in the desire to showcase the material aspects of the images and their wear and tear, and to amplify the power of the images through enlargement.
(Selected Enlargment prints - 105x140cm)
Malatì
by Luca Santese, Marco P. Valli
On June 4, 2023, the city of Naples officially celebrated the S.C.C. Naples’ victory in the Italian football championship 2023, an extraordinary event that last occurred with the ‘miracle’ of Diego Armando Maradona 33 years ago.
On the very same day, June 4, Luca Santese & Marco P. Valli released Malatì, a photographic newspaper shot in Naples between April 29 and May 4, the week that marked the championship’ certain victory.
Neapolitans’ mad eternal love for their city and football team has not spared the two authors, who, possessed by the same holy Malatì (literal for ‘madness’, and title of a Naples’ TikTok hit song which now became the team’s anthem), try to give it back in this photographic volume rich in icons of the city, its history, and inhabitants.
The latter are reinterpreted in a chaotic, extreme, reckless, and fleeing visual play—as a scooter speeding in the night through the neighborhoods’ alleys of Naples.
The cover’s photograph portrays a personalized cake realized for the two authors by a Neapolitan pastry chef; on the back side, the photographic volume ends with the cake’s left-overs surrounding the fragment of a Neapolitan poem.
The fanzine is the first edition of the Dispacci series, created by Cesura Publish with the intention of imprinting Italian news chronicles on the newsprint paper. All photographs shown in this publication were taken in Naples, Italy.
Newsprint paper
25×35 cm / 9,8×13,7 in
40 pages, 50 photos
Rotogravure
BUY FANZINE
(Malatì Exhibition, Raise your Zine Festival, Naples, Installation shots, September 2023)