Antonio Rovaldi photographs two Modenas, in Italy and Utah

Antonio Rovaldi (Parma, 1975) presents the exhibition 'MO’DINNA MO’DINNA (I wanna go back home)' at Galleria Metronom in Modena, curated by Marcella Manni. The show features 60 black-and-white analog photographs in medium-small format, centered on the experience of travel and the relationship between places and their names. In 2016, invited by the festival Fotografia Europea, Rovaldi photographed the landscape along the Via Emilia from Parma to Modena. At that time, living in the United States, he discovered Modena, an unincorporated community in southwestern Utah, near the Nevada border. He visited this ghost town, capturing its desolation and solitude, and recorded the testimony of one of its inhabitants, whose voice is heard in the gallery. Upon returning to Italy, he photographed the Italian Modena (ancient Mutina), whose name resembles the American pronunciation. The exhibition is structured in three moments where place and journey are protagonists. A white umbrella appears in all three groups of work. Manni writes that Rovaldi physically visited and crossed the places over time, suggesting not pure photographic documentation but closeness to the uncertain and unexpected, with the image sequence offering a rereading of an elastic and connective geography. The slow time of travel corresponds to that of observation, with references to Walker Evans and Ed Ruscha's 'Twentysix Gasoline Stations'.