The Dairy is the outcome of a photographic research project undertaken in 2011 and completed in 2014, and which operates on various levels: the post-industrial Emilian landscape, the collective memory of the 1960s and the iconography of a food product known throughout the world as Parmigiano-Reggiano, and last but not least, on a more subtle level, a biography of the photographer himself.  

The research starts out from the closure of an industrial dairy built in San Faustino di Rubiera, in the province of Reggio Emilia, erected in the early 1960s and inaugurated by the then Minister of agriculture, Medici. The dairy was considered a model of modernity in the production of Parmigiano-Reggiano and a series of photos from that period (found in the photographer’s own collections and included as an integral part of the project) were adopted by the Consortium to create an advertising campaign protecting the brand.  

The transition from the modern to the contemporary is a recurring theme in Guerrieri’s research, and for this he makes use of archive images and documents, shots of interiors and exteriors as well as texts in order to provide a multilevel analysis of complex phenomena.