More Necessary than Sun ▪︎ Mateo Trevisan

Opening: Thursday, October 22, at 12 noon
At 1 pm, the artist Mateo Trevisan will give a guided tour of the exhibition.
Curator: Senka Ristivojević

In 2022, Mateo Trevisan began travelling across the Western Balkans, visiting mines, coal power plants, and the towns and settlements that grew around them. People whose lives are inextricably linked to the industrial facilities that simultaneously provide their livelihoods and threaten their health and lives opened their homes to him. For three years, he travelled and photographed some of the largest industrial polluters in the region and in Europe, as well as environmentally vulnerable communities directly affected by mining and by production processes in thermal power plants and factories.

His two photographic series, More Necessary than the Sun and No Past to Return, bear witness to a broader environmental, social, and health crisis through images of transformed landscapes and the personal stories of miners, industrial workers, and residents of communities surrounding industrial sites.

More Necessary than the Sun documents life and work in and around Tuzla, Zenica, Banja Luka, Lazarevac, Obrenovac, Smederevo, Bor, Kostolac, Majdanpek, Požarevac, and Pristina. Outdated industrial facilities; coal power plants whose time has supposedly run out, yet continue to pollute; open-pit mines that dismantle the land and settlements; people who risk their lives in order to make a living. Different places, the same landscape of consequences.

No Past to Return explores questions of heritage and the continuity of life in the area around Bor. Under the pressure of capital and the logic of extraction, residents are confronted with the disappearance of land, homes, and places that hold family memories. The photographs clearly reveal how the expansion of mining and industry alters not only the physical appearance of the landscape, but also disrupts the continuity of life of communities whose existence is rooted in that place.

Mateo Trevisan is an Italian photographer and video artist based in Padua whose long-term documentary practice focuses on social and environmental struggles from an anthropological perspective. At the centre of his interest are contested and marginalised territories, as well as communities and grassroots movements that emerge in response to the consequences of political, economic, and environmental processes.

In 2026, he was among the winners of the Sony World Photography Awards for a series documenting the women’s environmental movement in Rojava, northeastern Syria. His work has been published in international publications including The Guardian, National Geographic, Politico, Le Temps, Internazionale, and Newsweek Japan, and has been presented in numerous international exhibitions.

Trevisan has collaborated with the European Climate Foundation, Greenpeace, and UNESCO. In 2024, he published his first photobook, I Guardiani della montagna — We Are Still Dreaming, edited by Danilo Montanari.

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Senka Ristivojević: The End of the Sun