The large rolls of negatives in the Aerial Photo Library of the Italian ICCD (Instituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione) form a parallel world of the already-mapped state. Each cylindrical container bears the name of the Ferrania film that gives the book its title: Aviopancro. Some contain only dark, gluey remnants; others hold vast visual archives. Once merely topographical data, the images are now reimagined by artist and photographer Olivo Barbieri. Freed from their military constraints and brimming with analogue materiality, these negatives become sculptural forms – no longer instruments of surveillance, but poetic codes of a documented reality.
