Coming to Light

From Thursday December 11, 2025 to Sunday February 15, 2026, the Museo Lercaro in Bologna hosts the exhibition Coming to Light.

Coming to Light is the new project by the artistic duo Antonello Ghezzi, born from an idea developed in 2020 during the lockdown period. Unable to access their studio, the artists transformed open space—fields, sky, sun, and nature—into their laboratory.
“Our salvation has always been imagination: the ability to see what is not yet visible,” the artists state, in harmony with the thinking of physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Anton Zeilinger: “The world is everything that happens and also everything that can happen.”

• A starry sky on earth
  From a fascination with stars and luminous bodies comes a visionary idea: hay bales capable of lighting up as night falls, thanks to a special net that absorbs daylight and releases it in the dark. A net to be given to farmers in the most remote valleys, to illuminate vast fields where the grass has been cut and the night is particularly dark.
  A boundless land-art project, a “starry sky” brought back to earth through nature and human labor.

• From imagination to research
  To turn this vision into reality, Novatex, farmer friends, and many enthusiastic people were involved. After a year of experimentation, it became clear that the work could not be realized as originally imagined: weather conditions, light pollution, and the duration of twilight cannot be controlled. As in agriculture, the harvest is not always what is expected; what remain, however, are relationships, experience, and the power of imagination, which always finds new paths.

• The magic of cinema
  Thanks to the encounter with director Giulio Filippo Giunti and screenwriter Maurizio Dall’Acqua, in the summer of 2025, on the hills between Bologna and Modena, a crew of more than thirty people finally gave visible form to that luminous meadow. The magic of cinema transformed into images what until then had remained only a dream.

The exhibition route: the exhibition tells this story through drawings, sketches, behind-the-scenes photographs, working materials, and new works created along the way, also documenting the most recent developments in Antonello Ghezzi’s research.

The journey culminates with the audience’s entry into the artists’ “invisible world”: an invitation to view reality on new frequencies, perhaps through the peephole of a door that does not exist.

The exhibition is a collective project:

• behind-the-scenes photographs by Roberto Cerè
• sound installations by Alessandro Gaffuri
• workshop with the boys and girls of the Youth Center “I cortili del Villaggio” of Ceis A.R.T.E.
• the first collaboration between the Museo Lercaro and the Cineteca di Bologna: on the occasion of the opening, on December 11, audiovisual content related to the project will be screened in Sala Cervi; the short film will be presented in 2026.

The exhibition is supported by the ME Vannucci Art Gallery of Pistoia, in partnership with Carta Bianca Aps, Bonlieue Film Lab, and Adcom.
The short film was produced with the support of Novatex Italia, Appennino Food Group, and Caseificio Canevaccia Soc. Coop.

Special thanks to Emil Banca Credito Cooperativo, the Youth Center “I cortili del Villaggio” of Ceis A.R.T.E., Bright Materials srl, Roberto Cerè, Alessandro Gaffuri, and Domenica Parrino.