In 2015, the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal presented a curatorial project led by Francesco Garutti, devoted to the controversial case of approximately 200 bridges in Long Island, commissioned in the early 20th century by New York urban planner and public administrator Robert Moses. Encompassing a digital publication titled Can Design be Devious? and a documentary film Misleading Innocence (tracing what a bridge can do), the urban history of these “technical artifacts” unfolds through complex narrative threads, revealing the bridge as an intrinsically ambivalent object in its way of engaging in politics, activating social and disciplinary relationships, and embodying its original function.

One of the most interesting aspects of this research – beyond its contribution to the cultural interpretation of infrastructural elements – was the effort to examine the bridge from multiple perspectives, portraying it as something alive, capable of escaping its instrumental nature by continuously re-signifying itself, succeeding in containing a multitude of realities, stories, expectations, and possibilities without altering its material form.

This liminal object, especially in a city as complex and multifaceted as New York, has the power to extend and expand the entire ecosystem around it. By intersecting and coexisting within its three-dimensional space, urban landscapes and human experiences that would otherwise be separate and disconnected can come together, and the bridge thus becomes a shared element in the intimate and personal mapping of the city that lingers in the memory of anyone who crosses it.

Francesca Magnani, a photographer originally from Padua who arrived in New York in 1997 and has always been drawn to its urban fabric, told Domus how the city emerges in her shots through a spatial journey meticulously built over years of walking, for both necessity and curiosity, allowing her gaze to wander and settle freely on the unexpected: 

Magnani dedicated a photographic series titled “Il ponte blu” to the iconic Manhattan Bridge, which connects the Dumbo and Chinatown neighborhoods. This project follows “Il ponte rosa”, her previous series on the Williamsburg Bridge, and will be the centerpiece of the exhibition “The Blue Bridge: Meeting on and beneath the Manhattan Bridge”, opening at the Artspring Pop-Up Store in Berlin on March 4.

In Magnani’s images, the protagonists are the spaces of creative freedom that unfold between the piers and columns of the Manhattan Bridge, such as the famous LES Coleman skatepark, as well as the people who animate the “theaters” of her daily walks. Though the bridge remains central, it serves as both a frame and a stage for encounters with diverse and spontaneous expressions of metropolitan life, capable of awakening imagination and challenging conventional practices of use and existence.

Among the most evocative shots of “Il Ponte blu” are those dedicated to the Bolivian skateboarder collective ImillaSkate, captured against graffiti-covered walls while wearing poleras, the colourful skirts typical of Andean tradition, in the act of transforming this symbol of domination into a tool for identity affirmation and cultural resistance. “I loved seeing them in a place so familiar to me, written and rewritten. A corner of New York where every wall is a palimpsest of graffiti, scripts, idioms, ideograms”, Magnani recalls. “With these markings in the background, their faces take on an ancient, ancestral, almost mythical quality for me”.

Through Magnani’s lens, the city's frenetic time dissolves into the fragmented time of photography, yet the Manhattan Bridge remains an ever-changing object, different in every single frame, never static. It constantly transforms, both materially and relationally, shifting in colors and light, mirroring the unpredictable connections that cross it and the almost anthropological fascination Magnani holds for it. She explains that “the power of coincidence that is not a coincidence, which brings people together without them knowing they were searching for one another”, is the essence that animates “Il Ponte blu”, where the narrative of representation fluidly moves between the bridge’s physical concreteness and the sentimental images that overlay it, ultimately finding synthesis.

Step by step, Magnani’s sensitivity uncovers the right way and moment to visually translate the stratification of this landscape without breaking it down into parts: she reveals its complexity by disrupting its surface monotony through unexpected intersections, historical and human, real and symbolic. She pictures a bridge that is not only crossed mechanically to reach the other shore, but one where life unfolds, allowing roots to grow.

Exhibition: Francesca Magnani. The Blue Bridge Meeting on and under the Manhattan Bridge Location: Artspring Pop Up Store, Berlin, Germany Dates: from 4th of March 2025 to 28th of March 2025.