The Flying Carpet

The Flying Carpet is an enchanting collection of colour and black-and-white photographs taken in and around Cesare Fabbri’s native Emilia-Romagna and Sardinia between 2005–2015. Under Fabbri’s lens we encounter a silent world roused from its slumber, where objects are animated and personified. Fabbri nods to the photographic practice of Luigi Ghirri, bringing to mind the Italian master’s words: “the camera is a magical toy capable of bringing together the great and the small, illusion and reality, our adult awareness and the fairy-tale world of childhood.” Indeed, in The Flying Carpet, we encounter scenes that might derive from comics – a rural hut with painted questioning eyes, a plant uprooted and hovering mid-air, and an embroidered carpet lifting up in the breeze. 

Cesare Fabbri (b. 1971 in Ravenna, Italy) studied photography and urban planning at the IUAV in Venice. In 2007 he took part in the Stuttgart Biennale of Photography and Architecture and was shortlisted for the prize Atlante Italiano 007 organised by Museo MAXXI, Roma. With Silvia Loddo he founded in 2009 osservatorio fotografico, an experimental platform for research on photography. This is his first book.