Insulae on Urbanautica.com

Urbanautica.com has gently published a text I’ve written on my own feelings behind the latest project, Insulae.

Photography that is drawing with light. At night, especially in those with no moon, the blackboard is black. Crayons and chalks are replaced with the color of artificial lights. Sulphorous green lamps, neon lamps, almost white light halogen lamps. The combination of lights generates flashes of the absolute, in contrast to the deafening silence of resting humans, animals and things. The sensations when reviewing the resulting photographs supercede observation. The reassuring presence of the car nearby. A dog in the distance, a truck that decelerates and then with its headlights illuminates the scene. A scene. A dazzling match between one’s own interior idea, the sense of the ongoing story and its location; in a sequence of mental images that tell so little explicitly but rather suggest a clue. A key that infuses mystery and ambiguity, that speaks to the borders of the visible – with the intelligibility of the subject – and inspires the viewer to find his own reading, to be carried by the image into a parallel and immersive world, with eyes like those of mine. The story of soldiers and their sleeping families interwines with the barbed wire and with the struggle between dark and light. An evergreen metaphor of the dualism that has so thoroughly permeated our culture. Positive and negative, good and bad, zero and one. And the flare becomes a distant UFO, just landed or about to leave. A lit neon, a bar of kryptonite. In the countryside that surrounds it, the boundary between earth and the sky, while everyone is asleep, I obstinately keep watching.