Giovanna Silva. L’ultima estate in città

From March 11 to April 2, 2026, Fondazione Officine Saffi presents L’ultima estate in città, a solo exhibition by Giovanna Silva dedicated to an exploration of Milan’s architecture. The project is developed in collaboration with Officine Saffi Lab, the creative platform for research, design, and ceramic production. Poised between abstraction and recognizability, Silva’s images articulate a vision of the city shaped by the interplay of fragments, surfaces, and structural elements. What emerges is an urban landscape that is at once elusive and intimate. For each photograph, the artist invited the creative team of Officine Saffi Lab to conceive and handcraft a bespoke ceramic frame.

The dialogue between the material density of ceramic and the apparent immateriality of the photographic image generates a measured exhibition rhythm, in which photograph and object echo and counterbalance one another. Together, they construct a layered narrative of Milan—its built environment and the imaginary that sustains it.

In his text written for the exhibition, architect Pier Paolo Tamburelli observes: “Giovanna Silva’s photographs portray a city assembled like a parking lot of things, where the Pirelli skyscraper is pressed against the station, Luigi Moretti’s office building on Corso Italia is glued to a slightly floral nineteenth-century palazzetto on the corner of Via Rugabella, and the restrained ornament of the Ca’ Brütta is mirrored in the near-curtain wall of the Montecatini building on Largo Donegani.” L’ultima estate in città originates in a close exchange between image and matter. Here, ceramic performs a dual function: it operates pragmatically as a frame while simultaneously becoming a conceptual and formal device—an architectural element capable of amplifying, redirecting, and reframing the viewer’s gaze.

The exhibition also offers an opportunity to reflect on the stratified structure of the Lombard capital. Tamburelli continues: “Milan seems the outcome of a slightly foolish experiment, in which a population of madmen constructed a city that perfectly embodies—without ever straying from it—the diagram of Walter Christaller’s central place theory (Modell der zentralen Orten): at its center the cathedral, followed by a sequence of almost perfect concentric circles, with buried waterways tracing precisely the rings of this infernal onion. At the core, the Duomo; then the center; then the inner ring of canals along the medieval walls; then the Spanish walls and the inner ring road; then the solid and somewhat tedious city of Engineer Beruto’s plan; then the outer ring road; until finally the concentric city acknowledges the existence of geography and begins to fray between the ring road and the bypass. In this utterly abstract city, ad circulli modum, cuius mirabilis rotonditas perfectionis eius est signum, everything that is regular is made by man, and everything that is irregular is, once again, made by man.”

Giovanna Silva (b. 1980) lives and works in Milan. Her publications include Saudiscape (Nero Editions); Napoli; Black Coffee No Sugar; Genoa; Milan. City, I Listen to Your Heart; Islamabad Today; Imeldific; Tehran; 17 April 1975: a Cambodian Journey; Afghanistan: 0 Rh-; Syria: A Travel Guide to Disappearance; Foxtrot Gate – Cyprus; Libya: Inch by Inch, House by House, Alley by Alley; and Baghdad: Red Zone, Green Zone, Babylon (Mousse Publishing); UN, CH (bruno); Niemeyer4ever and Palmyrah (Art Paper Editions); Walk Like an Egyptian and Good Boy 0372 (Motto Books); and Mr. Bawa, I Presume (Hatje Cantz). She participated in the 14th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia with the project Nightswimming. Discotheques in Italy from the 1960s to the Present (Bedford Press). Her work has been exhibited at MAXXI and MACRO in Rome, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, Triennale Milano, and the American Academy in Rome. She is the founder of Humboldt Books and San Rocco Magazine, and teaches editorial photography at ISIA Urbino, IUAV Venice, and NABA Milan.

Officine Saffi Lab is a ceramic studio dedicated to the creative investigation of ceramic production, collaborating with an extended network of local and international experts from the field. Foregrounding collaboration and co-creation, Officine Saffi Lab connect artists, designers and brands with ceramic culture. In an increasingly interdisciplinary and cross-cultural creative landscape, Officine Saffi Lab embraces an approach that balances research, experimentation, and professional craftsmanship. Operating in a continuous dialogue between tradition and innovation, Officine Saffi Lab weaves the legacy of Italian ceramics with international techniques and experimental processes. Officine Saffi Lab undertakes projects of significant scale and complexity while pursuing ongoing research into raw materials—an exploration that has led to the development of thousands of unique glaze formulas, now an integral part of its identity. Through an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach, the studio combines technical rigor with imagination, artisanal expertise with design vision. Composed of a group of craftspeople driven by curiosity and passion, the Lab approaches each project as an experiment—an investigation into what ceramics can be today—contributing to the shaping of new possible traditions. Founded in 2020, Officine Saffi Lab has collaborated with design companies such as Cassina and Poliform; fashion houses including Bottega Veneta, Loro Piana, and Fendi; as well as architects and artists such as Ronan Bouroullec, Elisa Ossino, Giampiero Tagliaferri, Conie Vallese, and Alberto Garutti.