Olivo Barbieri's 'Restricted' at ICCD: Aerial Photography as Critical Reflection

Olivo Barbieri (born 1954, Carpi) has created a new body of work during a residency at the ICCD (Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione), drawing on materials from the Aerofototeca Nazionale. The resulting exhibition, 'Restricted,' presents hyper-detailed aerial images of airports, terminals, runways, and industrial architecture, shot using tilt-shift techniques that simulate miniaturization. Barbieri worked with 42-meter-long negative rolls from the Aeronautica Militare archive, stored in thousands of tin cans, producing black-and-white images up to 60 meters long that resemble photogrammetric surveys of mountains, reservoirs, and urban areas. The work evokes the American topographic photography of the 1970s (Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams) and modernist aerial perspectives (László Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Rodchenko), while employing digital post-production to heighten artificiality. The title 'Restricted' refers both to physical forbidden spaces and epistemological limits on vision. Barbieri's images are devoid of human presence, prompting reflection on surveillance, control, and the paradox of seeing more while understanding less. The exhibition runs at ICCD in Rome.