Fondazione Zegna is inaugurating a new chapter in its ongoing commitment to art and nature with Racconti di boschi, di fabbriche and di persone (Stories of woods, factories and people), an original exhibition project ideated by artist Francesco Jodice (Naples, 1967) in collaboration with Sara Gentile and with curatorship by Ilaria Bonacossa. The project was commissioned by Fondazione Zegna in line with its roots and historical identity and is one of the initiatives marking the 25th anniversary of its set up.
From Saturday 17 May to Sunday 16 November 2025, Casa Zegna will be hosting an exhibition that brings together manufacturing, community and nature in harmony with themes dear to the Founder and part of its mission. The result is a sensitive and profound reading of the territory that is home to Fondazione Zegna on the part of an acute observer of the evolution of our contemporary social landscape, an artist who has always studied urban anthropological phenomena and the creation of new participatory processes.
Francesco Jodice’s images – often frontal views, sometimes close up, sometimes from a distance – capture a world of forms and lines, natural and artificial, whose frankness provokes amazement at what’s already known to us.
“The three stories and the cultural landscapes they describe are intimately intertwined: the pattern that emerges is an integral part of this territory’s identity,” explains Francesco Jodice.
Francesco Jodice’s project comes nearly 20 years after the work that Mimmo Jodice did (in 2008) in the same territory, offering a portrait of the landscapes of Oasi Zegna and the interiors of the wool mill (Lanificio Ermenegildo Zegna). The resulting narrative is a new rendering of the place’s essence and identity: two different aspects of the same territory, a place which, like them, exists in a never-ending natural evolution.
Commissioning art innervates the place like an eye-catching thread in a precious fabric, connecting generations, visions, transformations. It’s these bonds – between father and son, memory and project – that constitute the territory’s identity, in a potentially endless narration.
A dialogue between memory and future
The exhibition turns the spaces in Casa Zegna into a living environment, a contemplative place in which photography is a tool for exploring identity, roots and change.
To actively engage the new generations, Casa Zegna is organizing a cycle of workshops for students from local schools, thus creating a bridge between past and future and offering the young an opportunity to reread and re-interpret the landscape and values of the community they live in.
INFORMATION
Open every Sunday
Dates: 17 May – 16 November 2025
Opening hours: 14.30 – 18.30
Tickets: full price €7 | reduced €5
Also open on Saturday 17-24-31 May | Monday 2 June, Saturday 7 June | Saturday 11-18-25 October | Saturday 1-8-15 November
And every day in August
Casa Zegna – Via Marconi, 23 – Trivero Valdilana (Biella)
tel. +39 015.7591463
