The Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna takes its work across the city with Open Tour 2025, a major exhibition programme hosted by galleries and independent venues. This year, Galleria Studio Cenacchi takes part with two exhibitions featuring work by students from the MA Photography programme.

On the gallery’s upper floor, Transformations brings together photographs by Tania Gjoka, Viola Ricci and Eleonora Silvestri in a dialogue around nature and processes of change. The exhibition is curated by Paola Binante, Luca Panaro and Paola Squizzato.

The exhibition reflects on the ways in which photographic language itself is changing. In several of the works, flowers and plants marked by imperfections become the starting point for exploring transformation.

In Tania Gjoka’s Mutatio, fragile flowers destined to be discarded undergo a further metamorphosis. Their photographs are converted into audio files and manipulated through sound before being translated back into visual form. The resulting images bear little resemblance to conventional floral photography: their original colours have disappeared, replaced by spectral shades of grey.

Viola Ricci’s Leafcutter explores a different kind of transformation, shaped by an unseen protagonist that, in some sense, becomes a co-author of the work. The installation presents a sequence of leaves altered by leafcutter bees, whose image is revealed only at the end. The plants appear as photographic impressions, organic traces of found objects already reshaped by another living organism.

In Eleonora Silvestri’s Crown Shyness (no more), a large photograph is paired with a much smaller image that almost disappears among the frescoes of the exhibition space. The work depicts tree branches meeting and touching, overturning the phenomenon known as ‘crown shyness’, in which the crowns of certain trees remain apart, possibly protecting themselves from damage or disease. Silvestri reverses this separation. The contact between the branches becomes an image of collaboration and inclusion.