Stage - a conversation with Armando Moneta

Armando Moneta’s talk, “Water Towers: Landscape and the Preservation of Memory,” presents his ongoing photographic project mapping water towers across Lombardy, initiated in 2019. Through a systematic, almost taxonomic approach, the work documents these infrastructures as expressions of functional creativity and as meaningful elements of the contemporary landscape.

Water towers become a lens through which to reflect on the relationship between technology, territory, and obsolescence: structures often destined for gradual disuse that nevertheless continue to shape both urban and rural environments, oscillating between fascination and removal, presence and disappearance. The project examines their different architectural typologies and their relationship with their surrounding contexts, highlighting their symbolic value linked to water as a common good and their role as “sentinels” of change.

Using large-format analog photography, Moneta develops a rigorous visual research that combines documentation with an authorial gaze, inviting reflection on the preservation of memory and the impermanence of the contemporary landscape.