Manuel Cicchetti (1969)

n the early 90s, Manuel Cicchetti worked in the musical field, making album covers for BMG, EMI and CNI. He also worked as a set photographer for important theaters such as the Teatro Regio di Torino, and with orchestras and companies such as the Pomeriggi Musicali and the Compagnia dell’Opera Buffa.

In 1999 he designed the set and directed his first play for Cantieri d’Arte Internazionali di Montepulciano with the opera “On the high wire” by Philippe Petit; in 2001, for the Sound and Visions Festival in Milan, he directed “Orfeo a fumetti” with texts and drawings by Dino Buzzati and music by Filippo del Corno.

Together with Lorenzo Ferrero, Angelo Miotto and Jacopo Barigazzi, he founded the “Hdemia” working group to help shape the youth culture in Italy. From this experience arose the idea of ​​Officium, a company acting in events such as the Milan Music Festival, the WOMAD Festival – a traveling festival conceived by Peter Gabriel, the inauguration of the World Ski Championships in Sestriere. He worked as a creative collaborator with J.Walter Thompson, Inferenzia, Fullsix, Reply, Weber Shandwinck, Hill + Knolton, Young & Rubicam.

In 2015 he began publishing his works. The first book published by the Touring Club Italiano is “Monochrome, walking in the Ampezzo Dolomites”, the result of four years of walkings in the Dolomites Park. The sculptural and magnificent form of nature, going beyond the material and consumerist conception of beauty, is expressed through a use of black and white and a play of lights and shadows that reflect his previous professional experience in theatres.

The book came with a traveling exhibition starting at the Rimoldi Museum in Cortina d’Ampezzo. Each photograph was matched with an Ampezzo landscape painted by great masters of Italian painting including Sironi, De Chirico, De Pisis. In 2018 the same landscapes of “Monochrome” were devastated by the Vaia Storm: within hours, a terrible storm of wind and water overturned the forests, throwing millions of trees to the ground.

The Vaia storm left a dark and desolate landscape and its photographic evidence became the second book published by TMC, under the title “Vaia, a conscious journey into a disaster”. The work portrays the fallen trees, but it goes further: the words of Journalist Angelo Miotto accompany the photographies, in an effort to imagine the last thoughts of the trees before their crash.

The book, reviewed by the press as “a Spoon River of our woods”, was also made into an immersive exhibition with photographies printed in a very large format – over 6 meters wide – and accompanied with music and recited texts. It was chosen by the Ministry of the Environment for the “All4Climate 2021” event, and it was set up in Belluno for the Oltre le Vette Festival, in Milan on the external gates of the Palestro Gardens for the Museum of Natural Sciences, in Genoa at Palazzo Ducale and in many other places in Italy.

In 2018 begins the traveling photographic journey throughout the Italian territory for the making of Tempo Intermedio.