‘‘Dentro la città”: Gabriele Basilico’s Photography and the Embodied “Experience of Place”

This essay investigates Gabriele Basilico’s photography and aesthetics of place through a broad selection of his works from the 1980s and 1990s, which confirm him as one of the most influential photographers of his generation, both within Italian photography and beyond. Drawing on critical debates on architecture, landscape, photography, and the body, sI discuss how Basilico’s photography offers a unique portrayal of the demise of the modern industrial city, and of the recent changes undergone by the “città diffusa,” such as the collapse of a clear distinction between the urban and the rural and the growing focus on redeployment areas since the 1990s. Moreover, I demonstrate how, in line with some of his contemporaries, Basilico foregrounds the “experience of place” as an embodied, affective and multifaceted experience of inhabited space, and, in so doing, how his work makes an important contribution to reshaping our contemporary understanding of place.