FOTONI — Ila Bêka

On the evening of 26 June 2026, the Magazzino delle Idee on Corso Cavour opened its doors for the preview of FOTONI — the first solo exhibition ever devoted to the photographic work of Ila Bêka, the Friulian artist-filmmaker known worldwide as one half of the duo Bêka & Lemoine.

From 27 June to 11 October 2026, the exhibition — curated by Barbara Casavecchia and produced and organised by ERPAC, the Regional Authority for Cultural Heritage of Friuli Venezia Giulia — brings more than 300 photographs to public view for the first time, selected from a personal archive of roughly 300,000 images accumulated over forty years. Listed in the official GO! 2025 programme, the show extends the European Capital of Culture's cross-border energy from Nova Gorica–Gorizia down to the Trieste waterfront.

The premise alone captured attention: a filmmaker whose entire cinematic oeuvre entered MoMA's permanent collection in 2016, revealing that behind the camera there had always been a still photographer — one working mostly with a mobile phone, treating it as a pocket sketchbook rather than an instrument of formal perfection.

Inside the Exhibition

An archive that behaves like a stream of thought

Refusing chronology, the exhibition arranges forty years of seeing as a free flow of associations, intuitions and memories — closer to a film edit than to a retrospective. Louise Lemoine herself suggested the analogy: a montage that lets a narrative emerge from a formless mass of footage, just as the duo's films build stories without a rigid screenplay.

The prints carry no titles, no dates, no captions — nothing to steer the eye or distract from what visitors think, feel or imagine in front of each image. Formats vary freely: small prints sit beside monumental enlargements, and one wall is papered edge-to-edge with photographs to echo the creative chaos of the archive itself.

Two great currents run through the selection. The first is the body: black-and-white series from Bêka's adolescence in Latisana and on the beach at nearby Lignano Sabbiadoro, where bathers' bodies become volumes playing against space and movement. The second is light itself — reflections in the dark, sudden flashes, zones of shadow — treated not as a technical ingredient but as the very subject of the image.

Everyday geometry · from "Fotoni", 2026 © Ila Bêka

The body in space and light · from "Fotoni", 2026 © Ila Bêka

Why "Photons"

Quantum physics, meet self-irony

The title is a double gesture. On one side stands Bêka's genuine passion for quantum mechanics: Einstein's century-old hypothesis that light travels not as a continuous flow but as localised, moving quanta — photons — which bounce off matter, strike the retina, and are interpreted by the brain as shapes and colours. As physicist Carlo Rovelli's relational view suggests, objects hold no absolute properties; they acquire them through interaction — and light is the medium of every visual encounter.

On the other side lies a wink. "Photons" also mocks, gently, the monumental scale some prints assume in the gallery, compared with the pocket-sized device — a mobile phone — with which most of them were captured. Wandering city streets, Bêka registers waits, micro-events and fleeting apparitions, with what curator Barbara Casavecchia calls the power to restore a childhood sense of wonder: "a ray of light dancing amongst the dust, or a micro-rainbow imprinted on an open palm."

The Artist

From Koolhaas Houselife to a photographic confession

Born Filippo Clericuzio in Latisana in 1967, Ila Bêka trained as an architect at IUAV Venice and Paris-Belleville before turning to film — first with Millimetraggi, 168 microfilms that won the Festival du Film Très Court in Paris, then through a twenty-year partnership with Louise Lemoine exploring how people emotionally inhabit space and architecture.

Their forty-plus films — from the cult classic Koolhaas Houselife (2008) to Moriyama-San (2017), Tokyo Ride (2020) and the ongoing fifteen-chapter odyssey Homo Urbanus — have screened at CPH:DOX, Dok Leipzig and the Venice Biennale circuit, with the complete oeuvre entering MoMA's permanent collection in 2016.

FOTONI reframes that cinematic practice as the tip of an iceberg: beneath the films lies a forty-year discipline of looking, now finally printed, sequenced and released into the world. The accompanying catalogue, published by Miracoli, gathers a critical essay by Casavecchia and three conversations with Bêka, Lemoine and Luca Galofaro.

Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine · The duo behind Koolhaas Houselife, Moriyama-San and Homo Urbanus © Moritz Bernoully

What the Press Saw

Still Time to Visit

The photons are flying until 11 October

Exhibition page →