Giorgio Di Noto, Hidden Collections, 2025

Giorgio Di Noto has progressively explored photography as an unstable, ambiguous medium, constantly poised between document and invention. This trajectory finds a new dimension in the research conducted in the storage rooms, restoration laboratory, and photographic archive of the National Roman Museum: spaces usually inaccessible to the public, where the past is not exhibited but rather preserved, catalogued, and prepared for future vision. Here, the artist engages with collections of sculptures, mosaics, frescoes, epigraphs, and everyday objects from the Republican era to the late Empire, as well as with plates, negatives, prints, and slides relating to archaeological excavations, restorations, and documentation of artifacts from the early twentieth century to the present. In this exploration, Di Noto’s photography becomes both a stratigraphic and poetic tool, capable of interrogating not only the artifacts themselves, but also the photographic images that document them, and with them the technical and cultural conditions of their representation. Delving into archaeological images reveals traces of a complex process of manipulation that, to isolate the artifacts, erases and obscures, transforming the act of making visible into an act of subtraction. Thus, the document becomes an artifact, masking is reversed into revelation, and technical intervention is revealed as a creative act. Entrusting a visual artist with the interpretation of the National Roman Museum’s hidden heritage means recognizing that archaeology, like photography, is never neutral: it is a practice of selection, editing, and constructing meaning. Di Noto’s work seems to remind us that every archive preserves more than it declares; that photography is not only a document but also a language; that every image is never a completion but a process, and that over time it continues to reopen, transform, and generate other images.