Talk – “Il presente come reperto” – Conversation with Vincenzo Castella, Vittorio Gallese, Luca Molinari, Francesco Zanot, Marco Scotini

Friday, September 25th 2026, at 5.30PM

at the first floor of BUILDING GALLERY, Milan

Speakers:

Vincenzo Castella, Artist

Vittorio Gallese, Professor and Neuroscientist

Luca Molinari, Professor, Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”

Francesco Zanot, Curator

Marco Scotini, Curator of the exhibition and Art Director of NABA (Milan, Rome, London)

The event will be held in Italian.
RSVP required, limited seats available: events@building-gallery.com, +39 02 89094995

On Friday, September 25th, 2026, at 5.30PM, BUILDING will host a conversation with Vincenzo Castella, Vittorio Gallese, Luca Molinari, and Francesco Zanot, moderated by Marco Scotini. Taking Vincenzo Castella’s exhibition Timeless Archaeology as their starting point, the speakers will reflect on industrial landscapes as a form of active memory of the present, exploring photography as a medium capable of connecting perception, space, and historical consciousness. Castella’s images, freed from a purely documentary function, invite a form of slowed-down vision, in which every object becomes an embodied experience, a material archive, and a construction of thought.
The exploration thus examines the relationship between the body and perception, the urban and architectural transformation of industrial areas, and, finally, the specific nature of the photographic language—encompassing detail, scale, and seriality. What emerges is a conception of photography as an archaeological practice, capable of discerning, within the forms of the present, the stratifications of a time still unfolding, where matter, work, memory, and representation continue to overlap.

The event is being held on the occasion of the exhibition Vincenzo Castella. Timeless Archaeology (05.06.2026 – 03.10.2026), which unfolds across the three exhibition floors of BUILDING GALLERY, brings together for the first time a cohesive body of fifty-one large and medium-format photographic works, offering a cohesive and layered interpretation of the artist’s research on the industrial scenery from the 1980s to the present. Through a selection of works—most of which have never been exhibited before—spanning four decades of his career, the exhibition highlights the continuity and distinctiveness of Castella’s work, exploring the processes of transformation in the landscape and visual memory.
A central figure in contemporary visual art, Vincenzo Castella (Naples, 1952) established himself on the international scene in the 1980s, emerging in the context of the landmark 1984 exhibition Viaggio in Italia. Within this framework, his work takes the form of a multifaceted territorial investigation, developed through a progressive expansion of his fields of interest.