It’s not just a book, nor is it just photography. It’s a meeting of two ways of interpreting the territory: the industrial one of Casa Zegna and the analytical one of Francesco Jodice. Tales of Woods, Factories, and People was born as a narrative device rather than a volume, an experiment in perspective that seeks to bring together productive memory and contemporary imagination. The project will be presented on Tuesday, February 24, 2026, at 11:30 a.m. in Francesco Jodice’s studio in Milan, transformed for the occasion into a space for the exchange of images, territory, and community. For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Zegna Foundation, Jodice enters the Oasis not as an external observer but as an interlocutor. The factory ceases to be a backdrop and becomes a narrative structure, while the landscape reveals itself for what it has always been: a cultural construct, an archive of gestures and economies.

The dialogue with Sara Gentile and the curation by Ilaria Bonacossa reinforce this choral dimension, transforming the project into a collective reflection on the relationship between work, nature, and community. Three previously unpublished works from the student workshop will also be on display in Milan. They will then be presented at the Zegna Foundation on March 21 and 22, 2026, during the FAI Spring Days. The exhibition will run until April 26, 2026.
The result is a book that doesn’t document but interrogates. What remains of a region when viewed through generations? And how does the narrative change when younger perspectives also intervene?

The collaboration between Zegna and Jodice works because it seeks not an elegant synthesis but rather a fertile friction: heritage meets research, enterprise meets criticism, photography once again becomes a tool for understanding—not just for seeing. And perhaps this is precisely where the project finds its strength: in transforming an anniversary into a laboratory for the present (installation view, photo credit Studio Francesco Jodice).