Perimetro Piacenza is a polyphonic narrative in which people, places, landscapes and memories come together at one single exhibition, which, in Sebastiano Leddi’s words, founder of the community magazine Perimetro, “summarises the different experiences forming the main idea behind Perimetro Piacenza: to provide the opportunity to come together creatively through photography, which is capable of providing an image of a place, defining its landscapes and horizons and opening up new possibilities”.

The project takes the form of an exhibition and a monographic issue of the magazine Perimetro dedicated to the city of Piacenza. The project was launched through an open call in May 2023. The call was aimed at professional photographers and other people. They were asked to tell a story through images about the city of Piacenza and its surroundings. The project was boosted by the support of a number of local partners who helped us with this project, publicising and promoting the call through their own networks. Perimetro, as a photography magazine interested in how urban communities are represented, works on the assumption that cultural projects are based on relations between people.

It is a well-established method whose aim is to enable cultural projects (an issue of a magazine) to be carried out through an inclusive and shared process involving a variety of different players. The creative process does not follow a preset curatorial line, the approach is not based on defending a certain stance but rather on the idea that making a magazine is, in itself, a way of “creating a community”, a rhizomatic undertaking that photography captures and records with immediacy and spontaneity. Working along these lines, Perimetro has constructed narratives about different cities around the world: Milan, Rome, Tokyo, Nairobi and now Piacenza.

We went off on a bit of a strange tangent”, so its founder Sebastiano Leddi noted, “and looking back at those issues of Perimetro dedicated to cities that were created entirely based directly on the work of local photographers, the first thought that comes to mind is the role of the idea of coming together and contact with the people who brought about the projects and added value to the choices we made”.

XNL Piacenza has invited Perimetro to tackle the subject of Italian provinces for the first time. “The idea of looking at this kind of reality”, so Leddi goes on to note, “seemed to us the perfect opportunity to work on a smaller scale format; the difficulties are greater not just because of the smaller number of photographers involved but also because each step in the process has its own specific importance. In a big city there is greater anonymity, you get lost, communities are part of other communities. In the provinces, you get a greater fell for what is there and what is missing. This is one of the most interesting aspects that applies to both photographic stories about the city and also the campaign of portraits that forms the backbone of the exhibition”.

So Perimetro Piacenza is the outcome of an ongoing process, an opening up to new names, faces and places.

The projects published in this special issue about the city were selected based not just on quality but also on the need to tell a variety of stories. The issue contains seven stories that have to coexist together in the magazine. “From all the subject matter we received, we had to leave out those that seemed similar or somehow told overlapping stories, trying as we always do to cover a wide range of topics, styles, aesthetics and visions of the people whose work we published. By the end of the call, forty-five entrants had applied to take part, so we had to leave out several interesting works. We decided to widen the selection process by including eleven other projects that will be posted on our platform as part of the Perimetro Piacenza section”, so Leddi went on to say.

As usual, the issue covers a variety of subjects ranging from the sacred nature of loyalty to a football team as seen through the eyes of Piacenza fans on the terraces (in a story told by Nicola Braga) to the Farnesiana neighbourhood described through a series of black and white ambient portraits taken by Sergio Ferri.

In contrast, Andrès Maloberti tells us about the Trebbia and the timeless life that unfolds around the river, while Chiara Bussandri’s project ‘Umma’ takes us inside a Mosque, perhaps the only one in the city, not from a religious perspective but from a deeply human viewpoint. Alice Morelli tells us about “piacentinity” (being from Piacenza) and does so through a journey retracing the steps taken by her grandmother; she is the guardian of time that accompanies us out from the city into the fields of the surrounding villages. Nicola Roda draws on his wonderful ‘way with words’ to take us to an osteria in Cisiano ‘where people are still very much at the focus of attention, an old-fashioned way of creating a sense of community that is on the verge of extinction”.

The collection of works is completed by Alessandro Varacca, who tells us about Christmas and its foggy representation from a perspective that is both hyperrealist and surreal.

The exhibition showcases this issue of the magazine focusing on its main stories and also the 100 Piacenza 2023 Campaign launched by Luca Santese, a photographer and co-founder of the Cesura collective. It is a series of one hundred and five (to be exact) portraits that combine to create a landscape of human faces featuring some of the city’s most notable people.

In addition to Santese’s portraits, XNL Piacenza’s space displays projects by photographers who attended our workshop and whose projects we helped create: Eleonora Marzani, Emanuele Indolfi, Andrès Emiliano Maloberti, Nicola Rosa and Riccardo Garenna.

We would like to thank all the photographers who entered our Open Call. This call resulted in Perimetro’s official platforms digitally publishing projects by:

Nicoletta Novara, Filippo Fontana, Carlotta Magrelli, Riccardo Garenna, Tommaso Serra, Paolo Michelotti, Nicholas Bosoni, Emanuele Indolfi, Emanuele Ferrari, Eleonora Marzani and Ada Anselmi.

“I would like to thank everybody who took part in the Perimetro Piacenza project for all the interesting interaction we shared and for helping me in the very difficult task of trying to get to know a city like Piacenza, revealing aspects of it that are sometimes uncomfortable, but very authentic, and which allowed me to discover things I would never have known about.
After all, cities are very complex organisms and can only be described with real insight by those people who lie in them”.
Sebastiano Leddi – Founder and Editor-in-Chief

Perimetro is a Community Magazine born on October 22, 2018, in Milan. The project is conceived as an authorial interpretation of the present. It tells the story of the urban territory by exploring it through the people, events, and intentions that nourish it. The community and everything revolving around it. Through the perspective of some of the most talented photographers of our generation, it narrates the present through imagery.