Launched in 2024, the Voices Sector is entrusted each year to guest curators, who develop a proposal around a specific theme. For its third edition, Zasha Colah and Francesco Zanot explore the Disappearance in a dedicated space within the nave.

The Disappearance

“As the Bicentenary of Photography approaches, the medium finds itself in a paradoxical position. Conceived, among other reasons, as a tool to preserve what would otherwise vanish, photography is now being celebrated at a moment when its own traditional form appears increasingly unstable, transformed, and challenged by processes that are altering its nature and status. This paradox is the curatorial starting point for this sector. Referring implicitly to the surviving image traditionally associated with photography’s origin, View from the Window at Le Gras, the project rethinks an anniversary that can also be read as a threshold: between commemoration and obsolescence, between mourning and re newal. In this sense, the history of photography becomes inseparable from the broader cultural, political, and material conditions of disappearance. The section investigates disappearance through multiple perspectives and tempo ralities. It brings together historical pieces produced to record subjects, places, and phenomena on the verge of vanishing, alongside contemporary practices that use pho tography to resist the marginalization of vulnerable communities, endangered lands capes, and fragile social realities. Other artists engage the notion of disappearance as a material process, creating works destined to alter, fade, or auto-destruct over time. Others push photography beyond its conventional boundaries by merging it with pain ting, sculpture, installation, or other languages and disciplines, to the point where the photographic image becomes barely recognizable. Particular attention is also given to practices shaped by algorithmic editing, software manipulation, and artificial intelli gence, where images retain a photographic appearance while increasingly severing their indexical relation to reality.” Bringing together historical and contemporary positions, as well as works ranging from straight photography to hybrid visual languages, the section reflects on disappea rance not only as a subject represented by photography, but as a condition increasingly affecting the medium itself.“