The exhibition was presented during Spoleto67 Festival dei Due Mondi at the former church of the Manna d’Oro in Piazza Duomo, Spoleto, a 17th-century baptistery often used by the Carla Fendi Foundation to host its cultural projects. Invited to respond to the prestigious and recently established costume archive of the Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi, Rodriguez and Zamara selected costumes from historic operas and ballets, combining them in unexpected and elaborate ways, to emphasize and assess the way dress defines identity. Capturing the flare and detail of the original costumes whilst placing them in new situations referencing fashion, Rodriguez, who trained as a dancer and performed worldwide before turning to photography, presents his subjects as other-worldly entities with costumes as body-surrogates. Each models' movements – burdened or empowered – aligns their capacity for expression with the performativity of the dress.

A selection of these images was exhibited in Zamara’s site-specific installation, designed to theatrically illuminate the space and create a dialogue between Rodriguez’s work, the church’s oil paintings, and the high-relief figurative compositions on the baptismal font. The exhibition catalogue includes additional images from the project, along with a contribution from the curator and a conversation between Luis Alberto Rodriguez and Sara Sozzani Maino, in which Rodriguez discusses his early introduction to dance and how that experience almost instinctively led him to express the body’s movement through photographic imagery. “In a lot of these images you don't really see the model” he explains.  “I try to use my knowledge of the body to direct the subject and depict what it reflects” […] I enjoy it when you're looking at the image and you don't know who's behind there, but because of the physicality it's not static. There’s always a detail in the sculpture that makes you feel that there is humanity in it. It might be the most subtle thing, where a head tilts or a shoulder comes up”.

The synergy created between Mahler & LeWitt Studios, Carla Fendi Foundation and Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi, aims to highlight the artistic talent of Rodriguez and Zamara, increasingly sought-after protagonists in the world of art, fashion and design, enhancing at the same time the great endeavor carried out by the Festival in recent years for the recovery, conservation and cataloguing of a corpus of approximately 3800 costumes. The archive illustrates the history of performance at Spoleto’s festivals from the early 1960s to the 2000s, whilst charting shifting attitudes to culture and fashion. The costumes were created by the most prestigious Italian and foreign costume designers of the time and represent a heritage of great cultural value which completes the memory of some of the most remarkable historic events of Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi.

Luis Alberto Rodriguez

Luis Alberto Rodriguez was born in New York and trained as a dancer at the Juilliard School, performing worldwide for fifteen years before turning to photography. He continues to study the movement of the body, often portraying his subjects in sculptural and poetic poses. Now among the most in-demand emerging photographers in the worlds of fashion and advertising — having shot numerous editorials and covers for magazines such as Vogue US and Vogue France, as well as institutional campaigns for the New York City Ballet and fashion brands — Rodriguez continues to pursue his artistic research in parallel. He has published two books with the award-winning Marseille-based publisher Loose Joints: O (2023) is a study of nudes captured by the camera in states between collapse and ecstatic control, while People of the Mud (2020) draws inspiration from the cultural landscape of Wexford, Ireland, where he was an artist-in-residence at Cow House Studios in collaboration with FUTURES and Photo Ireland.

Afra Zamara

Afra Zamara was born in Italy and raised in Nigeria. From an early age, she developed an innovative approach to design that prioritized ecological principles. Named one of the British Fashion Council’s 2021 NEW WAVE Creatives, Zamara graduated from the London College of Communication with a specialization in photography. Over time, she became drawn to the creative energy and collaborative nature of set design, developing an interest in the practice of deconstructing and repurposing materials — a creative process that embraces sustainability. Zamara is also known for her work in highlighting and supporting emerging artists, having designed sets that enhance and showcase their work.