Paolo Simonazzi

The Thread and the River is a photographic story dedicated to the story of the Po river in Italy and the territories that the river crosses, consisting of about 50 shots taken by Paolo Simonazzi between 2013 and 2021.

The protagonist is the slow and heavy flow of the river, which appears even when not photographed directly: its presence emerges in the surrounding landscape and in the people who live in the places crossed by its waters.

Territories united as by a thread, part of a world perhaps in danger of extinction, and of which the author – in the wake of a photographic tradition that begins after the war – gives us visual traces, inviting us to listen to what Francesco Zanot calls the feeble song of a supra-territorial territory, attacked by political geography, clinging as it is to the shaky line of water for hundreds of kilometers.

Text in English and Italian.