Urbanautica

PROMISES MELT AWAY. CLAUDIO ORLANDI AND ULTIMATE LANDSCAPES

by Steve Bisson

This is not only about “seeing” glaciers melting, but realizing that their melting concerns our own ability to inhabit the world. The fragility of the glaciers mirrors humanity’s clumsy and desperate attempts to hide the facts, masking discomfort with the latest anthropocentric fix. It is from this awareness that Orlandi’s work emerges—not to offer solutions, but to open visions, questions, possibilities.

© Claudio Orlandi from "Ultimate Landscapes"

In the heart of Treviso, Casa Robegan hosts a photographic exhibition that challenges perception, demanding ethical attention to the melting of glaciers as indicators of climate change that is not only urgent but now incontrovertible. Ultimate Landscapes is a necessary cultural warning—let’s see why. We live in an era of “video-obesity,” in which images—even the most dramatic ones, like “before and after” shots of glaciers—are consumed and quickly forgotten. We are so saturated as spectators that we no longer react. And that’s exactly the point: what we need are not reactions, but what I call “reaffections.” What has been lost is an empathetic bond with the world, numbed by constant visual stimuli—not our reasoning. Reasoning comes later. It’s feeling that moves thought.

© Claudio Orlandi, installation view, "Ultimate Landscaes", Casa Robegan, Treviso, 2025

Orlandi invites us not so much to understand, but to comprehend—in the etymological sense of “taking with oneself,” of making the images our own. Digesting them, if you will. What I have elsewhere called a scopic metabolism.
Claudio Orlandi uses the image not as a simple document, but as an interrogative act—and therefore a provocative one. In the series Ultimate Landscapes, alpine glaciers covered by geotextile sheets are portrayed in a way that destabilizes perception. The visual similarity between the sheets and the glacial surfaces creates a tension that forces us to look, to question our capacity to truly see, in an age when everything seems already seen.

© Claudio Orlandi from "Ultimate Landscapes", series 6

© Claudio Orlandi from "Ultimate Landscapes"

The photographed landscapes—Rhone, Diavolezza, Stelvio, Zugspitze, Stubai—are not shown in their original beauty, but in an unsettling ambiguity: the white sheets, intended to slow the melting, evoke shrouds, funeral blankets, or alien landscapes—or perhaps they show that our way of seeing has itself become alien, or alienated. In short: other. Within this visual paradox lies the work’s deeper message: the shift from aesthetics to responsibility. Without an ethics of seeing—without awareness of where we look from and why—aesthetics is reduced to a form of cosmetics, a mere embellishment of tragedy.

Art as a conceptual experience questions not only the viewer but the very sense of viewing itself. The observer is not invited to “know,” but to participate: to become a witness and, therefore, an engaged actor. It is from this awareness that Orlandi’s work emerges—not pretending to offer solutions, but to open visions, questions, possibilities.

Ultimate Landscapes is thus a narrative that does not reassure or merely document, but transfigures. It is an invitation to change our stance: from passive spectators to responsible witnesses. In a time when ice melts and certainties get thinner, Orlandi shows us that art can still be a choice to move our hearts more than our steps. But only if we are truly willing to see. Otherwise, March 21—recently established as World Glacier Day—will remain just another date on the calendar, meant for a quick post.

Claudio Orlandi (website)

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