Exhibition
Future Studies
Leica Gallery Milano
2 October 2026 – 16 January 2027
Via Mengoni 4, Milan · Tuesday – Saturday
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Leica Gallery Milano
2 October 2026 – 16 January 2027
Via Mengoni 4, Milan · Tuesday – Saturday
To look more closely also means learning to see what comes next.
Prato, Tuscany. For more than a century the city has turned worn-out wool into new cloth, sorting it by colour so it rarely needs dyeing again.
Ferropolis, Gräfenhainichen. A festival crowd beneath Gemini, one of five machines saved from a lignite mine that closed in 1991 and is now a lake.
Planet Farms, Cavenago di Brianza. Basil grown in stacked layers under LED light, without soil or pesticides, at the edge of the city it feeds.
Nemo’s Garden, Noli, Liguria. The underwater farm seen from above: air-filled domes anchored off the coast, where basil and other plants grow beneath the sea.
Nova Innova, Rotterdam. A light by designer Ermi van Oers, powered by the microbes living in the water and shifting colour with its quality.
Verdronken Land van Saeftinghe, Zeeland. Surrendered to the sea in 1584, this protected marsh now gives the tide room to spread: the delta as it was before the dykes, and the model for those now being opened.
An aquatic plant under the microscope: the process that turns light into oxygen and sugar, seen at the scale of a single leaf.
It is from this tension between observation and anticipation that Future Studies takes shape: an exhibition spanning fifteen years of Luca Locatelli’s research, questioning the present in those places where the future is already taking shape.
His images take us to the frontiers of change: territories, production systems, laboratories and transforming landscapes where new ways of living, producing and inhabiting the planet are being tested. Real places where nature, technology and human intervention converge and where, amid possibilities and contradictions, new forms of balance are being sought.
The future Locatelli photographs belongs to the present: it already exists in the experiments and solutions that are reshaping our relationship with the environment.
At the heart of his work is a method that begins long before the photograph is taken. Each project grows out of extensive research, intertwining environmental, scientific, social and productive dimensions, and continues to evolve throughout the process. The precision of documentary photography meets rigorous compositions, unexpected perspectives and colours bordering on the unreal: images that capture the eye before revealing the complexity of the stories they contain. Photography, video and installation become parts of the same visual construction, different tools through which to observe and interpret the present.
Future Studies brings together a selection of images from the artist’s most significant bodies of work, coming together like interconnected parts of a single, continuously evolving investigation. The journey moves from climate change to the circular economy and culminates in Zeeland – Anatomy of a Living Delta, his new project created in the Netherlands in 2026, extending his exploration towards forms of adaptation that emerge from a different relationship between human and natural systems.
What emerges is an atlas of possibilities, rather than a catalogue of answers. Locatelli turns his gaze towards those frontier zones where existing models are being put to the test and new ones are beginning to emerge: spaces of experimentation where new forms of coexistence are being imagined and where, perhaps, part of our own evolution is at stake.
Future Studies thus becomes an investigation into possible futures through the traces they are already leaving in the present. Because sometimes, imagining tomorrow means first learning how to recognise it.
2 October 2026
– 16 January 2027
Via Mengoni 4
on the corner of Piazza del Duomo
20121 Milan, Italy
Tuesday – Saturday
10.00 – 14.00 · 15.00 – 19.00
Sunday and Monday closed