Road Trip takes as its starting point one of the great cultural myths of the twentieth century: the road as a space of freedom and as a promise of narrative. From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, from Stephen Shore’s photographs to Wim Wenders’ films, the road trip embodies both wandering and discovery, escape and exploration, the grounding of a territory and its transcendence.
This motif runs through American culture as a metaphor for emancipation. The endless road connects contrasting spaces: arid deserts and saturated megacities, small towns frozen in time and grandiose landscapes. It conjures visions where reality and fiction intertwine: isolated gas stations, garish neon lights, improvised stops, luminous or misty horizons – so many signs that, when accumulated, compose a collective memory of travel.
It is this shifting cartography that the exhibition seeks to explore. The invited artists are brought together around this shared experience of crossing. Their works, imbued with a strong narrative intensity, give form to images that are fragments of history – visual stories that distill the spirit of the road trip. They extend a tradition in which the landscape is not merely a backdrop but an actor, where each stage is an episode, and every vision colors the imagination of an endless journey.
By bringing these perspectives together, Road Trip offers a contemporary rereading of a founding myth: that of a road that is not only geographical, but also aesthetic and cultural – where each detour becomes a narrative, each landscape an inaugural image, and each stopover a story to be told.
