Home as Archive: The 7th edition of FOTO/INDUSTRIA Explores the Dwelling in All Its Complexity

The Fondazione MAST presents the seventh edition of FOTO/INDUSTRIA, the Biennial of Photography on Industry and Work, running from 7 November to 14 December 2025. Under the artistic direction of Francesco Zanot, this year’s theme—HOME—transforms the historic centre into a sprawling meditation on domesticity, featuring ten exhibitions across seven venues and over 500 artworks spanning more than a century.

“The home is a physical structure, whose construction in itself is a major industrial challenge, but it is also a symbol of belonging, protection, and identity,” explains Zanot. “It is a space of memory and transformation, whose evolution stems from the conditions, needs, habits, and desires of those who live in it.”

This conceptual framework yields remarkably diverse interpretations. At Palazzo Vizzani, Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena’s A Small Guide to Homeownership presents thirteen years of research into Monterrey’s suburban transformation. Organizing his work into four sections—new neighbourhoods, inhabitants, environmental impacts, and transportation—Cartagena subverts the dream of property ownership, revealing instead a fragmented landscape where urban growth prioritizes profit over collective welfare.

The biennial doesn’t shy from politics. Forensic Architecture, the London-based research collective, presents Looking for Palestine at Sottospazio, reconstructing the destruction of Palestinian villages since 1948 through documentaries, maps, and virtual models. Their forensic approach—using architecture as an optical device to investigate human rights violations—demonstrates how homes become evidence in larger political narratives.

Other highlights include Romanian photographer Matei Bejenaru’s ongoing Prut project, documenting villages along the river that has marked the European Union’s eastern boundary since 2007, and South African artist Vuyo Mabheka’s Popihuise series, which exists between document and fiction, reimagining childhood through the lens of ‘popihuis’—improvised dollhouses children create in townships.

At the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s Some Homes presents six series created between the 1960s and early 2000s across Netherlands, Georgia, Russia, Turkey, Iraq, and Indonesia. Her images capture structures ranging from natural-material dwellings meant to disappear within years to installations designed for centuries, all responding to both practical needs and cultural purposes.

The historical perspective emerges powerfully in Sisto Sisti’s Microcosmo Sinigo, featuring over 600 images from the Montecatini chemical plant and company village in Merano, built between 1924 and 1928. The self-taught photographer documented not just labour but the daily lives of families in this true microcosm, complete with shared spaces, community gardens, and cinema.

Running concurrently at MAST Galleries until 8 March 2026, Canadian artist Jeff Wall’s solo exhibition Living, Working, Surviving, curated by Urs Stahel, presents large light boxes and black-and-white prints offering powerful representations of post-modern life and late-capitalist society.

With free admission throughout and an extensive programme of talks, screenings, and workshops, FOTO/INDUSTRIA 2025 positions the home not as nostalgic refuge but as contested ground—where architecture meets psychology, economy intersects with politics, and where, as Zanot notes, we can gain “new perspectives and tools for understanding its complexity and contemporary dimension.” In Bologna this autumn, home is where the art is.

Fondazione Mast

@fondazionemast