Filippo Minelli (Italy, 1983) is a contemporary artist working internationally, analysing and researching contemporary landscape and its politics to create installations and performances documented through photography and video. His practice is mainly focused on liminal spaces and geographic areas of the post-globalisation world.
Landscape, identity, politics
Minelli graduated with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan with a BFA in New Media (2006). His academic education ran parallel to unauthorized public space interventions, which shaped his early artistic practice. Focused on landscapes and the public sphere, his work challenges the role of identity and its narratives across both physical and digital environments.
Drawn more to border zones than nations, Minelli explores the aesthetics of protest, bringing politics to an introspective level through decontextualization. His practice includes repurposing tear gas canisters, subverting the symbolism of flags, and borrowing from the visual language of protest slogans. Born and raised in Europe, he is particularly interested in contradictions—such as the tension between historical heritage and urban sprawl, reality and its representation, politics and identity, and, notably, the absence of critical emergencies from public discourse.
The Guardian >> Not Hollywood
Images have always been central to Minelli’s work. Initially, photography served as a means to document his interventions while traveling through the post-globalized world—an integral part of his ironic poetics on neoliberalism. His practice involves collecting and organizing images, downloading stock photos from the internet and repositioning them in physical spaces, 3D scanning landscape details to create sculptures, and using landscapes themselves to challenge the identity of those who shape them.
The Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington >
In 2011, Minelli began a systematic exploration of his native land, documenting and interpreting the landscape of northern Italy. This work culminated in the publication of Atlante dei Classici Padani, a book that examines the globalized contemporary landscape and the political narratives surrounding identity.
>> Link about the project
Inspired by political demonstrations, in 2009 Minelli started to develop the series Silence Shapes with the aim of signifying conflict landscapes by giving emergency a physical shape
What is reality?
In recent years, Minelli has embarked on an exploration at the edges of perception with What Things Are Not, a project that interrogates the inherently political nature of public space—how politics exploits it, manipulates the information landscape, and colonizes the collective imagination to shape perception in a complex process of identity construction.
Can the absence of identity itself be a form of identity?
How can the void left by globalization be reinterpreted to view communities and traditions through a non-nostalgic lens?
In 2013, Elephant Magazine (UK) dedicated the cover of its 13th issue to his series ‘Silence/Shapes’, and in 2014, Onomatopee (NL) published a monograph about this production. During the same year, Fundación Loewe (ES) organized two exhibitions on the series in Madrid and Barcelona, while in 2015/2016 Opéra National de Paris chose the series for the image of its yearly programming. In 2016, Minelli exhibited and performed the series for Somerset House (UK) and Maneж (RU), during the same year ’Silence/Shapes’ was on the cover of Monthly Photography Korea and it was published by many other international media outlets.
AnOther Mag >> Somerset House London
His work was exhibited by Somerset House (London, UK), Manifesta12, Münchner Stadt Museum (Münich, Germany), Total Museum (Seoul, South Korea), La Triennale di Milano (Italy), East Wing Biennial (London, UK), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), Manege (Moscow, RU), Fundaciòn Loewe (Madrid, Spain), Museu do Som e Imagem (São Paulo, Brazil), Biennale di Venezia 2011, Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires, Argentina), MACRO (Rome, Italy)
and was reviewed over the years by some of the major international media outlets such as Le Monde, The New York Times, Harpers, La Vanguardia, ARTE, Domus, Huffington Post, Corriere della Sera, Folha de São Paulo, El Mundo, The Guardian, Architectural Review, The National, CNN, La Stampa and Al Jazeera.
Since 2007, Minelli has been invited by several international institutions for research-projects, residencies and lectures: Aarhus University (DK), National Centre for Contemporary Arts (RU), Gyeonggi Creation Center (KR), Padiglione Architettura (IT), Epicenter Projects (USA), Fotografia Europea (IT), Centro Cultural de Belém (PT), Fondazione Benetton (IT), Courtald Institute (UK), Total Museum of Contemporary Arts (KR), IULM University (IT), UCL (UK), Centro Cultural Santa Monica (ES), Politecnico di Milano (IT) and Manifesta14 (KO) among others.