Lungo le Strade Blu. Along the Blue Highways

A selection of 38 photographs, chosen from the many that were taken in the USA by Francesco Conversano, the refined director of cinema del reale, between 1999 and 2017, over the course of his creation of several documentary films. 
Reality, memory, and poetry intersect along the secondary highways of provincial America, called “blue” because of the colour used in the famous road atlas by Rand McNally, re-evoking and re-elaborating routes, places, and stories of the collective imagination. 

Until a few decades ago, the experience of travelling without GPS, following directions on a map, left space for curiosity, chance, discovery and, by losing oneself along the highway, at times the journey would become a “total experience”. This fascination, together with the discovery of the marvellous dimension of everyday life, is present in Conversano’s cinematic and photographic journey along the blue highways. In such a way, fragments of narratives follow one another and intersect, made up of real geographical and human landscapes, but also of microcosms and micro-stories inherited from literary, pictorial, photographic, and cinematic images: an iconic representation of the American way of life along the rural territories of the United States.

Francesco Conversano, an author and director of international fame, has travelled throughout the world, crossing the infinite territories of cinema del reale, testing narrative forms and languages between reality and imagination. Europe, Asia, and America have been illustrated in moments of social and anthropological transformation, macrocosms and microcosms, megalopolises and villages, seeking threads and connections: relationships between humans and the world around them. For Conversano, “the documentary is a precious instrument for illustrating our times, the humans and the places of the world in dynamic dialogue with memory and the collective imagination. It is not an objective illustration of reality, but rather a a subjective and personal testament that “stages” reality with its own gaze”.
Biographical note— Francesco Conversano (Monopoli, 29th March 1952) is an Italian director. He has created around one hundred documentaries. In 1980, with Nene Grignaffini, with whom he designed each work, he founded the production company Movie Movie in Bologna. 

Conversano has participated in numerous festivals with his works, winning national and international prizes, including the David di Donatello for his documentary film, “The Wise Cat Catches Mice”: the story of China during its period of  greatest economic growth in the early 2000s. The film, created for Rai 3, ran for a whole year at MASS MoCA (The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), from February 2008 to February 2009. With the documentary series “Megalopolis”, created for Rai 3, he won the “Premio Ilaria Alpi - Premio della Critica” in 2008, and he created a series of events at MAXXI - Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI° secolo (National Museum of Twenty First Century Art) in Rome.

Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli 
22nd March | 25th May 2025