TerraProject Turns Its Back on Lake Garda's Postcard Shore

TerraProject photographed Lake Garda for MAG – Museo dell'Alto Garda, and then pointed its cameras away from the lake. The resulting archive, "Where the Lake Ends," curated by Giovanna Calvenzi, documents the territory around Riva del Garda through mountains, warehouses, peripheral shopping centres, urban gardens and school desks. The water stays in frame, barely. It is, as the collective puts it, "deliberately distant, merely mentioned."

That decision carries weight. Garda is one of Italy's most photographed bodies of water, and the postcard economy around it — tourists, holidaymakers, sporting visitors — forms the stereotype the collective set out to dismantle. Instead they chose, in their own words, not "the tourists who flock to the area for holidays and sporting activities, but those who give identity to the valley and the mountains surrounding Riva del Garda."

What does the work actually claim to be?

TerraProject is careful about its own ambitions, and that caution deserves attention. The collective states it does not want "to build an encyclopaedia of all those who live there, nor even compile a Baedeker of the place," but rather to "lead the viewer by the hand into our personal labyrinth of impressions and associations."

Fair enough. But read closely: an archive assembled by four photographers, from serendipitous and intentional encounters, framed as a subjective labyrinth rather than a survey. That framing is honest. It is also a shield. If the work is impression rather than documentation, the usual questions — who is missing, what is unrepresented — soften. The collective does not say how long the fieldwork ran or how many people it photographed. Those gaps matter in a project that claims to convey "the complexity and depth of the geographical and social reality of the territory."

Who is TerraProject?

The collective was founded in Florence in 2006 by Michele Borzoni, Simone Donati, Pietro Paolini and Rocco Rorandelli — one of Italy's first photography collectives. Their signature method is what they call "collective writing": collaborative projects with a cohesive visual style, built through networks of local stakeholders who guide the research.

The track record is real, not decorative:

• World Press Photo awards in 2010 and 2012
• The Gabriele Basilico Prize in 2020
• The "Italia Inclusiva" grant from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation in 2022
• The Italian Sustainability Photo Award in 2023
• The Photography Strategy grant from the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture in 2025

Their work has hung at MAXXI in Rome, the Rencontres d'Arles, the Triennale di Milano, MAST in Bologna, the Museo Alto Garda and the European Parliament in Brussels. Their photographs have run in Le Monde Magazine, The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Washington Post, Internazionale and L'Espresso.

A method, or a habit?

Since 2006 the collective has gravitated toward marginalised territories and overlooked stories, building what it calls an expanding map of Italian provincial life. "Where the Lake Ends" fits that pattern with almost too much ease: take a famous place, photograph its edges, privilege residents over visitors. The strategy has produced strong work before. Repeated often enough, it risks becoming its own cliché — the anti-postcard postcard.

What distinguishes this project is the commission itself. A regional museum, MAG, paid four photographers to undermine the very imagery that likely draws a share of its visitors. That institutional self-criticism is rarer than the aesthetic move it enables, and Calvenzi's curation signals that the museum wanted a corrective, not a brochure.

The collective's collaborative method — dialogue, exchange, participation with local communities — sounds admirable on paper. The source text offers no specifics on which stakeholders shaped the Garda research or how. Participation claims are easy to make and hard to verify; the proof lives in the images and the relationships behind them, and the announcement leaves both undescribed.

Where the collective is heading

TerraProject's recent commissions show the method travelling beyond Italy's provinces. In 2024 it produced a project on gambling addiction with the Tuscany Region and ANCI. In 2025 it developed work on Bosnia with the Department of Law at the University of Siena, under the IMPACCTS call. The Garda commission, meanwhile, sits inside a museum whose own exhibition history includes the collective's earlier showing there — an institutional relationship that appears to be deepening rather than concluding.