Lorenzo Poli

Lorenzo Poli is an Italian-born, UK-based visual artist and architect whose work explores the sacred oneness between humanity and nature.

After over a decade leading architectural R&D at Foster + Partners for Apple projects, Poli shifted from the construction of modernity to a metaphysical investigation aimed at reconciling the human–Nature divide.

Over the past four years, through self-immersion in the natural world and planetary journeys from Norway to Antarctica and through the Amazon, he has traversed untamed biomes, ancestral territories, DNA laboratories, and anthropogenic voids carved by extraction.

Drawing from the humanities, Indigenous knowledge, and spiritual ecology, Poli envisions a post-Anthropocene future in which Earth and humanity co-evolve in regenerative and symbiotic harmony.

His series Life on Earth earned the 2022 Sony World Photography Award (Landscape), praised for revealing the ethereal magic of untamed Nature; his ongoing investigation Geoglyphs of the Anthropocene received recognition in 2025 from the Sony World Photography Awards, UNESCO WWAP/OneWater, among others, and won Earth Photo 2025 at the Royal Geographical Society.

Join Lorenzo at Summit Photo 2026

Lorenzo will be speaking at Summit Photo 2026 on Sunday 19 July at 11.00am to the title Through the Earth-Body: From the Glacial North to the Geoglyphs of the Anthropocene.

From the glacial silence of the North, across the Amazon and into Latin America’s extractive territories, Lorenzo Poli unfolds a personal journey into the living body of the Earth. From the technological frontiers of sustainable architecture, his practice expanded into visual art through self-immersion in untamed biomes, scientific labs, ancestral territories and anthropogenic voids carved by industrial ambition.

Across the Land, photography becomes more than witnessing: it is an embodied practice of transformation — bridging visual evidence, Earth sciences, post-Anthropocene imagination and a renewed sacred relation with the living world.

The talk culminates in Geoglyphs of the Anthropocene, a long-term transdisciplinary investigation across South America’s mining territories, where sites of extraction are revealed as the geoglyphs of our time — monuments to the values we pursue. From this descent into the Earth emerges a luminous seed of regeneration: an opening towards humanity’s reconciliation with Nature.