Tatiana Macedo

Forbidden City

Text by Birgit Hein

1st Floor

Giovanni Ozzola

Atto Unico - Dove nasce il vento

Text by Eugenio Viola

In Giovanni Ozzola’s work, the horizon is a space of projection, a threshold between the familiar and the unknown, between the limits of our physical existence and the desire to move beyond them. For more than two decades, the Italian artist has explored this territory through photography, video, installation and sculpture, developing a distinctive visual language in which light, space and time become means of questioning our relationship with the world and our place within it.

Conceived for Dialogue Gallery in Lisbon, Dove nasce il vento (Where the Wind Begins) brings together three works produced between 2016 and 2026. The exhibition takes the form of a single environmental installation, an interconnected organism in which each element retains its autonomy while contributing to a larger perceptual experience. The space becomes part of this organism, inviting visitors to inhabit a network of images, perspectives and temporalities whose relationships unfold through the act of looking.

Two photographs — untitled - through a day, sei (2016) and Gobinda Hari (2026) — share a recurring motif in Ozzola’s visual vocabulary: an opening onto the sea, framed by the remains of an abandoned building. These images belong to an ongoing investigation of disused architecture, bunkers and other remnants of human occupation, places whose deteriorating surfaces preserve the traces of successive histories. Crumbling walls, graffiti, inscriptions and exposed materials coexist with the seemingly immutable presence of the ocean beyond them.

These images are structured around a fundamental tension. Architecture suggests enclosure, shelter and, at times, confinement, while the openings reveal an expanse that seems to resist any possibility of containment. The contrast is also temporal: the buildings register the passage of human time through their gradual deterioration, whereas the sea appears to inhabit a different, almost immeasurable duration. Yet Ozzola avoids any straightforward opposition between the artificial and the natural, decay and permanence. Instead, he considers how human experience becomes inscribed in the landscape, and how our perception of the world remains inseparable from the histories and memories we carry within us.

In untitled - through a day, sei, a circular aperture interrupts a graffiti-covered wall, framing the ocean beneath the delicate gradations of a fading sky. Its geometric precision recalls both a porthole and an optical device, drawing attention to the conditions that shape every act of looking. In Gobinda Hari, a roughly cut rectangular opening becomes a source of light, setting the wall’s material density against the atmospheric immensity beyond it. Endless Path in Temporary Structure, meanwhile, introduces a more pronounced architectural dimension: a ruined interior opens onto a distant horizon, its damaged surfaces and scattered debris exposing the fragility of the structures we build and inhabit.

For all their formal differences, the three photographs explore a shared existential condition. The abandoned interiors suggest a kind of mental architecture, spaces marked by accumulated experiences, memories and scars. Their openings become eyes through which we perceive the outside world, but also passages through which we might momentarily escape the confines of the self. The immensity of the horizon confronts us with our own finitude, drawing us between the desire to dissolve into something greater and the equally powerful need to return to the familiar structures of our identity.

This tension finds another expression in Sin tiempo (2017), the video that completes the exhibition. Opening onto an almost primordial landscape in which sea and sky seem to merge, the work gradually introduces signs of human presence. The natural environment gives way to the built landscape of an island, revealing traces of collective habitation before the camera settles on a solitary figure facing the ocean. With his back turned to us, the man communicates through Silbo Gomero, the traditional whistled language of the Canary Islands, developed in response to La Gomera’s particular geography and used to communicate across its valleys and ravines.

Here, the wind becomes the medium through which language travels, transforming breath into communication and reconnecting the individual with the surrounding landscape. Air enters the body, sustains thought, becomes sound and returns to the world. The distinction between nature and culture, between the physical and the immaterial, begins to dissolve. The whistle, at once a human utterance and a movement of air, seems to belong as much to the landscape as to the person producing it.

Within the exhibition, Sin tiempo establishes a dialogue with the photographic works that extends beyond their shared imagery. If the three openings can be understood as the eyes of a single body, the video becomes its breath. Photography and moving image, stillness and duration, vision and sound are brought into a relationship that transforms the exhibition into an expanded sensory experience. The visitor is no longer simply an observer standing before a series of images, but becomes physically implicated in the relationships between them, inhabiting the space in which their meanings intersect.

This understanding of the exhibition as a unified organism is particularly revealing of Ozzola’s broader artistic practice. His research has consistently extended photography beyond its documentary or representational function, exploring its capacity to activate a physical and psychological relationship with space. The image is never entirely self-contained: its meaning also emerges through its encounter with the viewer, the surrounding architecture and the circumstances of its presentation. What matters is not only what we see, but where we stand when we see it, and how that position determines our experience of the world.

Seen in this light, the abandoned structures that recur throughout Ozzola’s work are far more than evocative settings or symbols of disappearance. They are places in which different conceptions of time coexist, where the remnants of human activity encounter the apparent indifference of the natural world. Their openings both frame and interrupt our vision, reminding us that every landscape is also a construction of the gaze, shaped by our experience, our memory and our capacity to imagine what lies beyond the visible.

Dove nasce il vento brings these concerns together in a meditation on the porous boundaries between interior and exterior, individual and collective experience, memory and possibility. The horizon becomes a shifting point of reference rather than a destination, while the wind, invisible yet perceptible, moves between the works, connecting the body to the landscape, breath to language, and what can be seen to what can only be sensed.

For Ozzola, seeing is never a neutral act. To look outward is also to turn inward, to confront the histories that constitute us while acknowledging a world that exceeds them. The exhibition inhabits this uncertain territory, where the intimacy of individual experience meets the immensity of the unknown. Here, in the space between what contains us and what draws us beyond ourselves, the wind begins.

Eugenio Viola