There are places that seem suspended between what they once were and what they might become. With Italia O Italia, photographer Federico Clavarino builds an all-Italian visual journey through this tension, turning the urban landscape into a labyrinth of symbols, memories and questions.

Built from photographs taken in various Italian cities, the project takes shape on the ruins of an empire never fully resolved, where the monumental past keeps casting its shadow over the present. The images speak to one another, creating a path made of contrasts and correspondences, in which monuments, architectural fragments, human figures and urban glimpses weave together into an open narrative.

Through the use of light, unusual perspectives and deliberately disorienting framing, Clavarino leads the viewer’s eye along a sequence of details that resist immediate reading. Shadows, enigmatic symbols and barely sketched gestures become the elements of a reflection on the construction of collective identity and the weight of history.

A sense of stillness runs through the entire series. The cities often appear empty, as if frozen in an undefined time, and yet a human presence keeps emerging at the edges of the image: in a hand entering the frame, in the fragment of a column, in the broken movement of a passer-by. These are small but decisive traces, capable of revealing the deeply human dimension of these spaces.

In Italia O Italia, photography thus becomes a tool for questioning the present through its imperfections. It’s precisely the cracks in everyday life, made visible by the act of stopping time, that reveal the unique character of the places portrayed. Clavarino observes a country that seems to be waiting for a new direction, or perhaps a different fate, suspended between the monumentality of its own legacy and the possibility of rewriting its future.