Leaf shadows on the paving, and within the shadows, a fountain. This is where the exhibition “La lunga estate del ’26” (The Long Summer of ’26) begins, at Cavò in Trieste until 24 October: with the roundels of Barbara Stefani, who has long worked with documentary materials – archive photographs, maps, images of collective memory – and who, for this cycle, chose to let figures emerge from the shadows of leaves cast on the pavement. The result is a series of roundels in green and lilac bichromy, where the image forms and dissolves as if beneath a canopy stirred by the wind.
Her subjects are details of Trieste’s fountains: fragments of spouts and basins, whatever recalls the place where water should be. This year, it was not there. Water went missing for everyone – people, plants and animals alike – and the fountains remained, telling of an absence. Stefani does not illustrate them: she entrusts them to the shade, the only cool thing left in the square during the controra, the enforced pause of early afternoon when the heat empties the streets.
Around the roundels, the exhibition builds its context. La Controra: Climate Perceptions of Urban Space, a project curated by Cizerouno and funded under Interreg VI-A Italy-Slovenia, gathered over 240 reports from citizens in the summer of 2026, on the places they avoid because of the heat and those where they seek refuge. At Cavò, that cartography becomes a large participatory map, to which visitors add their own pins. Giancarlo Surez’s photographs capture the slashes of sunlight in the flat hour of midday and the urban voids; the soundscape, with the voice of Zita Fusco and the testimonies gathered, lets us hear a city in retreat; a wall gives back the numbers of the summer, with a small glossary of urban heat.
It is a work in which painting does not comment on data but stands beside it: the city counted by its citizens on one side, the city remembered through images on the other. The bilingual Italian-Slovenian project thus closes the journey it began in June, bringing into dialogue an artist’s language, a gathering of memories and the figures of one of the harshest summers on record.
On Saturday 10 October, as part of the Giornata del Contemporaneo (Contemporary Art Day), the exhibition opens to a meeting with the artist and a short guided tour. Barbara Stefani will meet the public before her roundels to speak about her method and the choices that shaped them; the tour will then move through painting, photography, sound and map, in a route designed both for those who come from art and for those who come from the city.
La lunga estate del ’26 is part of the official programme of Barcolana Cultura.
