Jubilees 2000–2025: From the Sabina Cuneo Archive to the Present

Reasons for the Exhibition  

1. The connecting thread of Sabina Cuneo’s discourse

“I have long wanted to photograph Rome, my city. I have tried several times over the years to take pictures, each time looking for a theme that could be the pretext for a story […]. Finally, two years ago, when Rome became the construction site for the Jubilee works, I suddenly found the thread.”

With these words, Sabina Cuneo described the genesis of Roma 1999, her 2000 exhibition at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, to the photography scholar Ennery Taramelli. Her first solo show in a public institution featured 50 color photographs taken over two years in various neighborhoods of the Italian capital, which she explored by bicycle − “the means through which I look, explore, and venture around Rome,” as she described it.   

The construction sites erected around the city before the Jubilee − fences of wooden planks painted with a distinctive shade of red − serve as the connecting thread of the narrative. This colorful band covered streets, squares, archaeological sites, museums, gates, bridges, statues, and parks, creating a chromatic underline that becomes the true protagonist of the images: almost a kind of open wound, that paradoxically seemed to signal the city’s rebirth and that was captured by Cuneo against its thousand-year-old soul and material essence. The presence of humans is sparse and incidental, scattered among the numerous advertisements often reduced to ghostly, often illegible fragments. From Trastevere to the Quirinale, from Porta San Paolo to Castel Sant’Angelo, from the Pincian Hill to the Oppian Hill, Cuneo’s attention is draw to the city’s iconic locations. She captures aspects and details that, obscured by the deluge of the ongoing work, acquire new and sometimes surprising forms and meanings.   
Here is a newlywed couple leaving the Church of San Giorgio in Velabro, navigating all kinds of obstacles; the shadow of a bicyclist crossing a square that resembles the corral of a cowboy ranch; a boy bathing his head in a fountain enclosed by fences. They are the only signs of life in sunlit settings that are majestic yet disturbing in their monumentality, where the stillness of stone is disrupted by the flow of barriers, boundaries, and obstacles. The fences are like a curtain, evoking the red of the saints’ cloaks in Caravaggio’s paintings or Alberto Burri’s Sacchi (sacks), as if highlighting Cuneo’s art-historical sensibility.   

2. The anthropological and ethnographic gaze of Sabina Cuneo  

A child of diplomats, Cuneo developed a nomadic and cosmopolitan bent at a young age, leading her to study Art History at La Sapienza University in Rome in the 1970s. For her thesis on nineteenth-century funerary sculpture in Italy’s monumental cemeteries, she used a camera with black-and-white film for the first time as a documentation tool.

In the early 1980s, she moved away from her thesis research to shoot a series of abstract images − exhibited in several private galleries in Rome over the following decade − inspired by her interest in Burri’s work and seventeenth-century Caravaggesque painters. “We would travel all over Italy to visit exhibitions, and Sabina’s eye would focus on chromatic details obsessively,” recalls Rossella Caruso, a contemporary art historian and friend of Cuneo’s at the time. “She photographed in black and white, printed the images at home to control every stage of development, and devoted herself to material subjects such as road pavements.” By the early 1990s, she turned to anthropological and ethnographic photography, inspired by the teachings of Diego Carpitella and Luigi Lombardi Satriani. Together with her husband, Carmine Puzo, she documented festivals and religious rituals in southern Italy. One section of the exhibition is dedicated to this body of work.

The photographs stem from an artist’s gaze that captures details reflecting the whole − a city in the midst of regeneration, as if receiving a transfusion of new blood. The idea to repropose Roma 1999 twenty-five years later, on the cusp of another Jubilee, invites visitors to reflect on Rome’s ability to embrace the challenges of change − a pressing challenge in the present day.   

3. Roman Summer (Estate romana) by Matteo Garrone   

In 2000, the young director Matteo Garrone made his third film, Roman Summer, which he dedicated to his father, Nico Garrone (1940–2009), a theater critic and expert in experimental and avant-garde theater. The film follows the journey of three characters − played by Rossella Or, Monica Nappo, and Salvatore Sansone − through various neighborhoods of Rome that are disrupted by the Jubilee construction sites. Much like the city portrayed in Cuneo’s photographs, this Rome is one of underground clubs, theatrical performances, and streets and squares baking in the summer heat. In an interview conducted for the exhibition − and displayed here for the first time − Garrone reflects on the genesis of his film and his relationship with the Eternal City, where he still lives and works today. LP