West

The volume accompanies the exhibition “West” by Francesco Jodice, presented in Naples at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale from 8 November 2023 to 8 January 2024 and presents the full version of Jodice’s research project comprising 70 images. WEST chronicles the rise and fall of the last great Western empire in the period between the start of the Gold Rush (1848) and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers (2008).
Travelling through the deserts of the American West and one of the oldest geological structures on the planet in three long journeys, the artist and photographer Francesco Jodice reinterprets a part of our history through a visual repertoire of myths and ruins, utopias, mirages and failures: the archaeology of a present that is already past. In an era of reinterpretation and revisionism, WEST proposes an alternative history of the power and culture of the West as a whole, not only of the United States, but it also pays tribute to a visionary and perhaps unrepeatable history, that of the most powerful machinery of imaginaries that has ever existed. The seventy large-format colour photographs taken across eleven states – California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and South Dakota – are accompanied by maps and historical and iconographic materials.

The volume is completed by texts and theoretical contributions by Francesco Zanot, Matteo Balduzzi, Francesco Costa and Mario Calabresi.