The 7th edition of the FOTO/INDUSTRIA Biennial in Bologna is set to offer visitors a comprehensive exploration of photography's relationship with contemporary themes, focusing specifically on the concept of 'HOME.' Running from November 7 to December 14, 2025, this major photography event will feature ten exhibitions across seven venues in Bologna's historic center, plus an additional exhibition by Jeff Wall at MAST titled 'Living, Working, Surviving.' The biennial, promoted by the MAST Foundation, presents over 500 artworks that examine the processes, gestures, and relationships that define everyday working life, with free admission to all exhibitions.
According to artistic director Francesco Zanot, the theme of home serves as a lens for interpreting the complex relationships between photography, industry, work, and technology. 'The home is a physical structure, whose construction in itself is a major industrial challenge, but it is also a symbol of belonging, protection, and identity,' Zanot explains. 'It is a space of memory and transformation, whose evolution stems from the conditions, needs, habits, and desires of those who live in it.' The exhibition concept invites visitors to mentally inhabit both the spaces created by photographic projects and the historic venues themselves as they move through Bologna's heart.
At the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, German photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg presents 'Some Homes,' featuring six photographic series created between the 1960s and early 2000s across the Netherlands, Georgia, Russia, Turkey, Iraq, and Indonesia. Her work explores home as a mirror of material culture, documenting everything from temporary structures built with natural materials meant to disappear within years to installations designed to endure for centuries. Schulz-Dornburg's approach combines documentary style with conceptual influences and social concerns, offering viewers a global perspective on domestic architecture.
Palazzo Bentivoglio hosts Romanian artist Matei Bejenaru's ongoing project 'Prut,' which began in 2011 and focuses on villages along the Prut River banks. Since Romania's 2007 European Union accession, this river has served as a natural boundary of political Europe. Bejenaru's images connect viewers with a rural world that remains rooted in tradition while being exposed to contemporary transformation. The same venue's Sottospazio laboratory space features 'Looking for Palestine' by the UK-based Forensic Architecture collective, which places the concept of home at the center of their investigation into Palestinian village destruction since 1948. Using documentaries, maps, historic photographs, virtual models, and infographics, the collective examines armed conflicts and environmental destruction through an architectural lens.
At Palazzo Vizzani, Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena displays 'A Small Guide to Homeownership,' the result of thirteen years of research into the suburbanization phenomenon that has radically transformed Monterrey over the past two decades. Organized like a property guide, Cartagena's images challenge the myth of property ownership as security, revealing a fragmented landscape of distant, isolated suburbs where urban development prioritizes profit over collective welfare. This critical examination of housing policy demonstrates how industrial and economic forces shape domestic life.
The Fondazione Collegio Venturoli, a cultural space established in 1826 according to Bolognese architect Angelo Venturoli's wishes in a building that originally housed an Illyrian-Hungarian college, presents three exhibitions exploring living as communal, emotional, or conceptual constructs. Julia Gaisbacher's 'My Dreamhouse is not a House' documents the Gerlitzgründe complex in Graz, designed in the 1970s by architect Eilfried Huth as one of Austria's first participatory social housing experiments where residents co-created both space and social models. South African artist Vuyo Mabheka transforms childhood memories into symbolic scenarios in 'The Series Popihuise,' referencing a popular township game that serves as a low-cost version of dollhouses, where children recreate domestic spaces using improvised materials. Swedish photographer Mikael Olsson explores two houses by architect and designer Bruno Mathsson in 'Södrakull Frösakull,' revealing their modernist rationalism alongside their temporal fragility and dialogue with landscape, deliberately avoiding conventional architectural photography in favor of creating enigmatic and unsettling presences.
MAMbo – Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna presents 'Quarta casa,' the first retrospective dedicated to Italian photographer Moira Ricci, featuring works spanning approximately twenty-five years. This comprehensive exhibition demonstrates the coherence of Ricci's research through the recurring theme of home, showing how domestic spaces serve as repositories for layered identities, genealogies, and family memories. Her pioneering work on domestic archives illuminates the crucial relationship between photography and collective memory, establishing her as a significant voice in contemporary Italian photography.
The Fondazione Del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna showcases 'Microcosmo Sinigo,' featuring work by Sisto Sisti, a self-taught photographer and worker of Emilian origin who emigrated to document the Montecatini chemical plant and company village in Sinigo (Merano), built in the 1920s. Between 1935 and 1950, Sisti captured both labor activities and daily family life, creating an intimate portrait of this industrial community. The exhibition features private moments and village views of what functioned as a collective dwelling – a complete microcosm with shared spaces, community gardens, and bars. These remarkable images were selected from over thirteen thousand photographs preserved in the Fototeca of the Archivio Provinciale di Bolzano.
At Spazio Carbonesi, Irish artist Kelly O'Brien explores domestic work by weaving together her family's stories with broader issues of class, gender, and occupation in 'No Rest for the Wicked.' O'Brien advocates for the visibility of working women and their struggles, celebrating the home while simultaneously revealing the invisible labor that sustains domestic life. Her work demonstrates how the personal and political intersect within domestic spaces, highlighting often-overlooked contributions of women to both household and economic systems.
The 2025 FOTO/INDUSTRIA biennial arrives at a pivotal moment when the fundamental concept of work undergoes redefinition due to automation, artificial intelligence, and sustainability concerns. The eleven exhibitions collectively illustrate these transformative changes, which naturally encompass evolving concepts of home and living. This comprehensive approach transforms the idea of home into a sophisticated critical tool for interpreting history, politics, economics, memory, and cultural heritage, demonstrating photography's power to document and analyze contemporary social transformation.
