Federico Casella - Cigarettes

Progetto Spazio Libero presents Cigarettes, a photography exhibition by Federico Casella. Following its debut in Belgrade in September 2026 at the Summit of the Non-Aligned festival, the exhibition continues in Milan at the former church of San Carlo alle Rottole. In November 2025, Federico Casella set out in his car on a journey of some ten thousand kilometres through the Balkans, Anatolia and the South Caucasus. The photographs taken along the way and printed in Yerevan, Armenia, during one of the final stops form the core of the exhibition. “Every place is nowhere, and here is everywhere.” — Federico Casella Much of the narrative unfolds from inside his car. From his seat, Federico watches the world pass beyond the window. The car offers shelter while keeping him at a distance from what happens outside; the window becomes a threshold across which that distance is continually renegotiated. As the journey progresses, places cease to be destinations and become a shifting backdrop, gradually blending into one another. What remains is the experience of being there, in that particular moment, without needing to ask where. The cigarette recurs throughout the images as a familiar presence. It marks time without measuring it, accompanies the journey without setting its course. Perhaps it is also an excuse… The old excuse of stepping out to buy cigarettes and, for a while, not coming back. In Milan, the photographs rise from brick plinths, forming a monument to the journey. They are housed in a church that was demolished and rebuilt using some of its own rubble. San Carlo alle Rottole was demolished in 1963 during the construction of the surrounding apartment blocks, despite its protected status. The protests that followed forced its reconstruction, completed in 1966 using some of the materials left on site. Something of its origins survives in those materials: of the neighbourhood before the apartment blocks, of what might otherwise have been erased altogether. The little church stands as a figure of resistance. Its history brings us back to what urbanisation, then as now, takes away from places and the people who live in them: the traces that allow us to recognise what was there before, the memory of a life that precedes our own. What is built in place of something demolished can never fully restore what was lost. It is here that the Cigarettes memorial finds its place. The road Federico travelled, preserved in his photographs, meets the traces of another history. The church welcomes us even if we have never known it before, even if we have never seen the neighbourhood that once surrounded it. It allows us to feel that something belongs to us without ever having owned it, without having been part of it from the beginning. Why are we constantly asked what we belong to, and where? We could be everywhere and nowhere, yet feel that those colours, those scents, those horizons are our own. Pass through unfamiliar places as though they had always been part of us. Belong to every place without needing to own any of them. curated by: Valentina Tiso