The exhibition 30 Years. The Wild Horses of Sable Island reveals survival and fragility in a changing world. In Venice, it presents 36 large-format photographs, both black and white and color, dedicated to the wild horses of Sable Island, a remote strip of land in the North Atlantic. In an ideal dialogue with the fragility of the Lagoon, Roberto Dutesco’s images portray a precarious ecosystem where beauty arises from resilience and adaptability.
Hosted at Le Stanze della Fotografia on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, the exhibition is part of the symbolic context of the 2026 Venice Biennale, offering an immersive narrative in three acts that guides visitors through origin, adaptation, and future. The horses, photographed without human intervention, become a metaphor for silent dignity and fragile balance, threatened by climate change and the erosion of natural habitats.
The images and films invite a slow and engaged gaze: not mere naturalistic documentation, but an emotional experience that connects the vulnerability of the island with that of Venice itself—a city suspended between water, memory, and resilience.
The language of survival
Roberto Dutesco’s photography stems from a direct and prolonged relationship with Sable Island, built over more than thirty years of returns, waiting, and listening to the landscape. His gaze does not seek the exceptional but presence: bodies enduring wind, shifting sand, and tides, conveying a concept of beauty that coincides with survival.
Through an essential and cinematic visual language, Dutesco creates images where time seems to slow down. The movement of the horses, the vastness of the horizon, and the precariousness of the environment become elements of a visual narrative that combines intimacy and vastness, fragility and strength.
The exhibition path, divided into three immersive environments, avoids captions to prioritize emotional experience: an invitation to feel, even before understanding, the deep connection between living beings and their territory.
Roberto Dutesco. Images as an act of care for the ecosystem
An internationally active artist and filmmaker, Roberto Dutesco has dedicated over three decades to documenting the wild horses of Sable Island, creating the largest visual body of work ever produced on this equine population. His work has played a decisive role in protecting the island, raising public awareness that led to its recognition as a natural park.
For Dutesco, art is a tool of responsibility: a means to generate awareness, care, and a sense of belonging toward the most vulnerable ecosystems. His images do not merely show a remote place but activate a broader reflection on our relationship with nature and the future coexistence between humans and the environment.
Presented by the IAMWILD Foundation and curated by Denis Curti, the exhibition proposes art as an act of stewardship: an invitation to recognize fragility as a form of strength and resilience as a possible shared horizon.
