SerraGlia is the pseudonym of Italian visual artist Lorenzo Servi (b. 1979), trained as an architect and based in Helsinki. His work moves between photography, urban observation, and book publishing, using the city as a field of visual research.

Since 2017, the book has been his main medium, developed through Other Editions, the publishing platform he founded.
Through posters, temporary installations, and publications, SerraGlia circulates visual fragments that blend seamlessly into the fabric of the city or find a second life on the printed page, generating new ways of reading urban space and time—without giving up a playful and ironic взгляд on everyday life.

Your work moves between photography, observation of the city, and publishing. If you had to explain to someone who doesn’t know you what you do, where would you start: from photography, from walking through the city, or from the idea of training the eye to notice things we usually ignore?

I start from walking, from wandering without a specific destination. During this drifting, I collect visual notes, almost always with my phone. I stopped using a camera years ago and, in a way, also stopped considering myself a photographer. I’m no longer interested in capturing the “perfect” image. Photography has become for me a source of raw material, which I then rework digitally and conceptually.

Many of your images come from details that most people don’t notice: a forgotten object, a mark on a wall, a random juxtaposition in urban space. Do you remember the first time you realized that those small details of the city could become the core of your work?

Maybe there wasn’t a precise moment, but rather an accumulation of small episodes. When I was painting graffiti, about thirty years ago, I realized that I saw city walls differently from others: I searched for them, “scanned” them, both to find surfaces to paint on and to read what others had left behind. That’s when I understood that the same city can be read in different and parallel ways. My architecture studies reinforced this. I remember an outdoor class in front of a stone: we spent half an hour observing how it had been worked, deducing tools, time, and stories. It was part of a building I saw every day, but from that moment everything changed. From there I began working on these different layers of interpretation, often fantasizing and speculating about possible meanings—which is ultimately what interests me in art: seeing reality reinterpreted through someone else’s eyes.

Before fully dedicating yourself to your current research, you trained as an architect. Architecture teaches you to read spaces, proportions, and materials. Did this background change the way you look at the city through photography?

Yes, I was very attached to a “correct” kind of photography: composition, perspective, cleanliness. Then, between 2014 and 2016, I abandoned that kind of interest and language. I moved toward more conceptual work. At the same time, I also distanced myself from photography as a final object to be framed and looked at as it is. I’m more interested in using it as a tool: something that serves to evoke, suggest, and spark imagination.

Many of your projects also take shape through books and publications. What does the book allow you to do that a single image—or a photograph seen in the street—cannot?

The book allows you to build an intimate path: a space where thought takes shape. With a single image, I’ve always struggled to say everything. I’m also very interested in text and in the dialogue between text and image. The book makes this dialogue natural. Images create rhythm, respond to each other, build a sequence: it becomes almost a guided walk. It’s also a format I can control more easily in every aspect: I handle everything, from content to layout to production. Except for distribution and the commercial side, which are the only things I don’t manage directly and have entrusted for some years now to IDEA Books.

Let’s play a little game: if your work were an element of the city—a road sign, a crack in a wall, a bench, a shop window, a bridge—what would it be and why?

Maybe a scratch on a freshly renovated wall. It’s something that shouldn’t be there. A mistake, a damage. But if you look at it long enough, it stops being a defect and becomes a trace: of a gesture, of time, of a presence. My work tries to do exactly that: find something interesting in what is normally ignored.

You’ve also created games and instructions for workshops or urban walks, inviting people to observe the city differently. In this case, where does the artistic work end and where does a more educational dimension begin? Is there really a boundary between the two?

I don’t think there’s a clear boundary. Many projects are born as observation exercises. No special skills are needed, just attention and curiosity. In workshops or walks, I simply try to activate this way of seeing. At that point, the work becomes shared. In the end, education is communication. And when it truly works, it is both art and entertainment. And that is already part of the work.

We live in a world full of images: advertising, social media, screens everywhere. Has training the eye to notice small details in the urban landscape become more difficult today—and therefore even more important?

I’m not sure it’s more difficult. Maybe it’s just rarer to stop long enough. Today images compete to be seen, while many of the things that interest me don’t ask for attention. They remain there, in an almost invisible zone. Training the eye, truly observing, requires time, slowness, attention. Ultimately, we are also what we look at. If we learn to find interest in what appears banal, our thinking expands—and perhaps we become more alive ourselves.

In Helsinki, the city where you live, you also founded Other Editions, an independent publishing house “specialized in book-format works that combine art, images, and contemporary visual languages to create new forms of storytelling.” How did the idea of starting a publishing house come about, and what kind of books or perspectives are you interested in bringing into this project?

Other Editions (OE) was born from a very simple frustration: exhibitions ended too quickly. The book allowed me to build something that lasted, but above all to say more. Before starting Other Editions, I printed small editions, often in 1–3 copies, more as a personal archive than as actual publications. In 2017, with the catalogue of one of my exhibitions at the Finnish Museum of Photography, I began to take it more seriously.
Today many works are conceived directly as books: I think first about the format and the title, then I develop the project. Sometimes they also become exhibitions, but not always. To date, I have published about 16 books and zines with OE, mainly my own work, with the exception of the book-magazine The City Is Ours, created with other artists in six issues.
All connected by a shared interest: observing the city in a different way.