Massimo Ricciardo

Artist

Massimo Ricciardois an artist and educator. He studied in Florence and Potsdam and lives in Turin.

His artistic practice, characterized by a painterly sensibility, draws on archives, photography, and participatory processes to explore the relationships between communities, landscape, and cultural practices through a postcolonial lens. In recent years, he has delved into the relationship between food, conviviality, landscape, and architecture through “Culinaria, outdoor practices”—a research project that views cooking not only as a relational tool but also as a critical one, capable of fostering encounters between local knowledge, agricultural practices, and collective narratives, while questioning the forms of production and resistance of knowledge related to food.

Projects for Volcanic Attitude

For Volcanic Attitude 2026, Ricciardo develops Culinaria, outdoor practices, a project that connects cuisine, matter, and the volcanic landscape. Through clay-crust cooking, earth, body, flesh, and fire intersect, evoking the use of clay in the Aeolian Islands, the muds of Vulcano, the practice of hot-sand burial, and the imagery of the bodies of Pompeii. The island's anthropomorphic landscape thus becomes part of a reflection on the relationship between the body and natural matter.

Selection of recent exhibitions / projects / conferences

Winner of two editions of the Italian Council (the 10th in 2021 and the 13th in 2024) and of Cantica21 with the video installation Patrizio, his major exhibitions include Frag-ment-to (2021) at BOCS in Catania; Listening to Voices – in the frame of the Eastern Sugar (2021) at the Futura Gallery project in Prague; Visual Politics of (Im-)Mobility (2020) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin; Objects of Migration Photo-Objects of Art History: Encounters in an Archive (2017–20) at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence; Luther and the Avant-Garde (2017) at Karlskirche Karlsplatz in Kassel; Baustelle Europa/Europe Under Construction (2016) in Dresden; Dispossession (2015) at Palazzo Donà Brusa for the 56th Venice Biennale.

Places
Spiaggia Acque calde, Vulcano
Salita sul cratere La Fossa, Vulcano