Comunicato stampa

Pellestrina thin island
Photographs by Anton Giulio Onofri

a project by Cristiana Collu and Olga Strada
with a text by Giovanni Montanaro

September 24 – October 6, 2026
Fondazione Querini Stampalia

September 24 – November 4, 2026
Galleria 200C Giudecca

Opening
September 24, 12:00 PM
Fondazione Querini Stampalia

September 24, 6:00 PM
Galleria 200C

Pellestrina is the protagonist of the exhibition promoted by the Fondazione Querini Stampalia and the Galleria 200C Giudecca from September 24 to November 4, 2026.
A strip of land and sand that unites and separates the lagoon landscape and which, through the photographs of Anton Giulio Onofri, becomes an opportunity to connect different places in the city. Here, the island reveals itself through the light, colors, and silence that accompany its rhythm, restoring to the landscape its most essential dimension.

The exhibition Pellestrina thin island, a project curated by Cristiana Collu and Olga Strada, unfolds between the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, featuring five images taken by the photographer during the winter season, and the Galleria 200C on the Giudecca, where the narrative continues through summer shots. Uniting and expanding this visual journey is a text by Giovanni Montanaro, written for the occasion, which accompanies the images and helps convey, through words, the complexity and changing nature of the island.

In winter Pellestrina, in the photographs at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, seems to shrink until it becomes a thin bone stretching out toward the sea. Approaching it from the Lido, one proceeds by subtraction: houses, businesses, roads, and human presence progressively thin out, noise fades, and toward Ca’ Roman, the landscape seems to give space back to vegetation, animals, and the wind. It is an intimate, almost suspended island, where the sea becomes the point to reach toward and nature appears closer and more solitary. In summer, through the shots exhibited at Galleria 200C on the Giudecca, it emerges as a small world in motion. The colors of the houses suddenly more vivid, the bell towers, the moored boats, the voices, the daily gestures. The island opens up to the slow murmur of afternoons, the scents of the lagoon, and that collective dimension which winter had hidden. But here too, behind the joy and color, remains the sign of water that can bring destruction, the presence of the Murazzi seawalls protecting it, the awareness of a territory continually exposed and in need of protection.

It is this transition, from winter rarefaction to summer vitality, that captures Pellestrina in its entirety: not two different islands, but two possibilities of the same place. Onofri traverses both, letting the atmospheres and the breath of the island modify the landscape, without ever erasing its deepest nature.

This gaze upon Pellestrina reactivates a memory the photographer has previously explored: the project ideally dialogues with Rome closed city, the work created during the Covid emergency, when Onofri ventured as far as the sea of Ostia to record the surreal suspension of a suddenly emptied world.
At Pellestrina that experience returns in a different form. It is no longer the exceptional state of the pandemic, but the possibility of finding, within the normality of an island, a time removed from time: a slower, more elemental, almost biological rhythm, where the gaze can finally come to rest and feel part of the landscape. And it is above all in the winter dimension that this condition emerges with greater force. When our presence withdraws, even what usually remains on the margins becomes visible again. Flora and fauna seem to reclaim the spaces we have colonized; for a moment, the landscape appears withdrawn from our scale.

This apparent harmony carries with it a more unsettled awareness: that of the fragility of the balance between man and nature and our difficulty in recognizing limits.
In this shifting strip of Venice, photography thus becomes a space of listening. Onofri records what happens when our presence recedes, allowing a reality to emerge that we normally pass through without seeing.
The images lack urgency; instead, they guard a profound tension. They speak of Pellestrina’s vulnerability and, through it, that of the archipelago.
The island becomes a lens through which to look at Venice: a city built on a fragile balance between land and water, nature and human intervention, permanence and transformation. And Onofri’s photographs restore to this landscape a dimension that is both intimate and collective. Each image seems to tune the gaze to a slower frequency, inviting us to be present, to recognize what changes and what endures.

Pellestrina, the Giudecca where part of this photographic exhibition finds a home,
Castello the sestiere where the Foundation is based, thus become parts of the same journey, cultural geographies through which to experience new forms of presence, dialogue, and participation.

Anton Giulio Onofri was born in Rome in 1959. An author and director for Mediaset, Rai, and Sky Classica, he has created films and photographic features for the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, the Quadriennale di Roma, and other public and private cultural institutions. During the 2020 lockdown, the Galleria Nazionale in Rome commissioned him to create the photographic narrative “Roma città chiusa” (Rome closed city). Dating from 2021 is “A casa di Hans” (At Hans’s home), a photographic exploration of the legendary home in the Castelli Romani belonging to composer Hans Werner Henze before it was cleared out following his death. In 2022, he exhibited “PU.Ra” at the Civic Museums of Pesaro, a photographic exhibition on the rationalist architecture of Pesaro and Urbino. The architecture magazine Panteon entrusted him with the entire photographic apparatus for its year-end issue dedicated to the Roman locations of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s books and films. Also from 2022 is “Non mi troverai” (You won’t find me), a series of shots in the Neapolitan home of artist Gian Maria Tosatti, exhibited at the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome, the Mudima in Milan (2023), and Spazio Bianco in Pesaro (2024-25). In 2024, he was among the 40 finalists of the Terna Photography Award, and his work was exhibited at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. He regularly writes a column dedicated to cinema for ArtsLife, titled “La Bussola di Ago”.

Pellestrina thin island
Photographs by Anton Giulio Onofri
a project by Cristiana Collu and Olga Strada
with a text by Giovanni Montanaro

Venue
Fondazione Querini Stampalia and Galleria 200C Giudecca

Duration
Fondazione Querini Stampalia
September 24 – October 6, 2026

Galleria 200C Giudecca
September 24 – November 4, 2026

Opening
September 24, 12:00 PM
Fondazione Querini Stampalia

September 24, 6:00 PM
Galleria 200C Giudecca

Opening hours
Fondazione Querini Stampalia
Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM; last admission 5:30 PM

Galleria 200C Giudecca
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Admission to the exhibition is free for both venues

Addresses
Fondazione Querini Stampalia
Castello 5252, 30122 Venice
T. + 39 041 2711411
manifestazioni@querinistampalia.org
querinistampalia.org

Galleria 200C Giudecca
Fondamenta San Giacomo 200/C, Venice 30133
+39 328 6495390
info@galleria200cgiudecca.com
galleria200cgiudecca.com

Press contacts
Fondazione Querini Stampalia
Sara Bossi
T. +39 041 2711411
M. +39 339 8046499
s.bossi@querinistampalia.org

Galleria 200C Giudecca
olga1strada@gmail.com