Iginio De Luca's (1966) artistic research lies at the intersection of social critique and public space, viewing the environmental crisis as a symptom of a broader fracture in contemporary value systems. Through a language that combines irony, civic engagement, and direct interventions in public space, the artist questions the ways in which reality is observed and consumed, using photography, video, and urban actions as critical tools to make the contradictions of the present visible.

Tevere Expo (2021) is an emblematic project of De Luca's poetics and is composed of a series of fifteen images, two of which recently entered the Farnesina Collection. The work brings to the surface the hidden soul of the Tiber River, transforming it into a metaphor for a compromised ecosystem and, at the same time, for a community shunning its responsibilities. The portrayed waste and refuse only partially emerge from the water, like an iceberg: what surfaces refers to is a larger submerged world, made up of abandonment, neglect, and daily denial. In this shift between visible and invisible, center and margin, natural and artificial, the work questions the very boundaries of ecological and collective identity, making their profound instability evident.

Subsequently, the artist brought these photographs into the public space through large urban billboards in Rome. The project thus takes the form of a paradoxical advertising campaign that "sponsors the useless," denouncing the logic of accumulation and indifference in the relationship between humans and the environment.