My work starts from travel notes that I have collected over years as a great number of pictures matched by a few lines of writing that give an help to piece together the puzzle of places and situations I have experienced. It is known that the least detail of what we live is stored in our mind, but it is not kept and recognized as a coherent whole. In the process of recalling, past scenes come to our mind one at a time. Each one stands alone, surrounded by a vague fog that contains and hides all that is around.
Being this selection the result of a mental association, finally I have got groups of images whose peculiarity is to be "transversal”.
“Surfing” on images and choosing them the way I do means to make the consistence of  things crumble, mining the evidence of  a relationship between time and space, that typically belongs to the tradition of the reportage and of the travel-book.
Being isolated, out of context and out of a narrative intent, the image betrays the objectivity of the event more than ever, and it can be the starting point of the infinite possibilities of imagination.
This is the reason why all my projects are all connected to  one another through recognizable junctions and are kept open, as a work that is always in fieri.
All this work can be read as a path through which we can recognize the map of human mind, with its archetypes, its knots, its juncitions and branches, its roads, its maze where images go back and forth, from the beginnning to the end and back again, then somewhere else, mixing and fading away just as the deceptive process of memory.

 

Let's cross the channel
We are rarely focused on the instant of passing through, going from a plce to another. If we pay attention to this moment, we can catch subtle differences in the humor of things. It is like going from a word to another, whose  air has a peculiar scent, INTRISA of the history of that place, of people who has inhabited or still inhabits it, of their presence and of their essence.  And when we are in, we are part of this air and we leave our invisible but persistent mark there.
Let’s imagine of being in a town we have never seen before… we are going to cross a bridge… the place we are going to find there is often completely different from the one we have just left, maybe two hundred metres behind… and when we go downstairs into the METRO and pass through the windy corridors that take to the platforms… how many subtle changes can we perceive along the path, when we are focused on that?
We can feel the atmosphere of a place as synthonized on a specific frequency, just as the colors of the spectrum or the notes of a music scale. Each place has its own tone and a specific atmosphere that can be perceived and described with reference to its corresponding colour.

The Alchemist
Projected for O/pen Pics
The aim of this project is to translate Coehlo's story into images through the same language suggested by the characters:
"That's a good luck omen," the Englishman said, after the fat Arab had gone out. "If I could, I'd write a huge encyclopedia just about the words luck and coincidence. It's with those words that the universal language is written" [...]
"There's no such thing as coincidence", said the Englishman [...]
The boy knew what he was about to describe, though: the mysterious chain that links one thing to another, the same chain that had caused him to become a shepherd, that had caused his recurring dream, that had brought him to a city near Africa, to find a king, and to be robbed in order to meet a crystal merchant [...]
One could open a book to any page, or look at a person's hand; one could turn a card, or watch the flight of the birds…
whatever the thing observed, one could find a connection with his experience of the moment. Actually, it wasn't that those things, in themselves, revealed anything at all; it was just that people, looking at what was occurring around them, could find a means of penetration to the Soul of the World [...]". English translation by Alan R. Clarke
So, my images express this story as it would result by reading key events and characters in the cards.
I have used shots of Moroc (2006) and Andalusia (2010) belonging to my Travel book.

Metro-peoples
Each image of this series is divided into three areas corresponding to the “places” that characterize and define either the urban and metropolitan life  or human experiance itself, lining between the chaotic life “on the surface” and the need to descend “into the deep”.
Three “parallel worlds” are showed:
- all that is “on the surface”
- people: mass and faces, actions and feelings
- going “into the deep”: the underworld.
Subways, garages but also enclosed areas such as shopping centers, cellars, , nightclubs are a sort of “parallel world” where people work, meet and hang around.
All this recalls the atmosphere of science-fiction literature and films, where humans live in the underworld most of their lifetime.

Gray. Cloudy Europe on the road
Photoes taken on the road, from the car... the windscreen and the window on my side come between the camera's eye and the landscape out there... the atmosphere of these northern countries is still gray, but it sometimes becomes magic...
Fog is the kingdom of all possibilities and changes, of all that has not taken any direction yet and is still free to play all roles or do nothing... but shapes must sometimes come into life
Mist is the metaphore of filter, that distorts objects and disturbs the sense of direction.
Our lifetime journey begins in a mist and goes on in a mist as well.
On our path/journey/maze/bubble/theatre/film/videogame, we fumble all the time, never being sure of the right way and knowing nothing about the accuracy nor even of the reality of our perceptions.

These images are either large prints or also photoes collected in the artist’s book GRAY. Cloudy Europe on the road.

Silent witnesses
…sometimes, objects that crowd our daily life can undergo a transformation so that we can perceive them as they were either detouched observers or involved actors in human events…
...they look like our silent friends or guardians... or beings that belong to a parallel world, where they interact with each other, careless of human presence...
...in that situation, in that light, in that precise relationship with  space and with the other elements of the landscape, a certain thing takes a peculiar posture, it performs an action that communicates and evokes…
It is just a question of  space-time relationship between those elements. It is an open gestalt, that suggests something and that requires to be closed.
We are sure of knowing everything and we assume that we can use or exploit all the so called inanimate things to our liking. But how can we say for certain what is living and what is not? Cells of our own body live at a level different from ours; they have consciousness, they act and have relationships between each other in their world. They live apart from us, even if they are we ourselves.

These images are either large prints or also photoes collected in the artist’s book Silent Witnesses.

Silent Witnesses. New York (U.S.A.)
... now you’re crossing the road...
the crowd swarming about a few instants ago is almost vanished...
... you are entering an- other place...
... walls, doors, stairs, everything around is watching something missing...
... telling about someone who was there, waiting for someone who is coming...

Penelope's web
It’s a reinterpratation in contemporary key of the relationship between Ulysses who is sailing the seas and Penelope who is (maybe) waiting for him waving her web/net and surfing it…

Gateways
When a threshold is there (a door, a gate, a passage), it shows a frontier, but it means that there is something beyond then the opportunity to cross the border.
It may be a little change in your life or a sort of cosmic crisis, but it's a passing-through anyway... maybe there is a point or an instant where it is possible to switch from one Self to Another.

Milk
Luoghi d’arte is a cultural project resulting from different suggestions, aimed at the valorization of  valuable naturalistic and architectonical environments. Artists are invited to render the atmosphere of the place mixing different languages, between research and creation, to investigate our protean contemporary world. It is a project whose intend is to give special attention to a number of professional artistic researches based on the means of contemporary culture (my translation of an excerpt by Lucia Anelli).
These are digital elaboration of shots taken wandering in the manor farm. They are not parts of the architecture or places that would normally attract people’s attention. Instead, they are movable goods or unimportant detalis, that I have found there but could be easily moved or even thrown away: the tractor, the wheelbarrow, the lace used to keep a gate closed.
This work is based on a synesthetic suggestion: each image evokes one of the natural or artificial flavours very often added to milk, to make it tasty-looking.
The meeting between eyesight and taste gives birth to these images, put one next to the other to form three banners hanging from the ceiling of the farm cowshed.

Travel book
I let places take life little by little... It's the same process of memory, of dream, of imagination... It reminds of the image slowly emerging on the photo paper. It's also the game of life, of death and rebirth. It's the game of art. Everything comes and goes, appears and disappears, reveals and disguises itself.
The digital technique is a magic tool, it follows your brain and its images almost at once... it's really as if you can create a thousand worlds in the time and space of one thought...

Tarots
Tarots are known as a divination tool, but I’m interested in them as Archetypes, that is why they can be interpreted in a number of different ways, their core still remaining the same.
I thimk that in human communities, throughout the ages and regardless of the distance, forms surely change, but the core of human emotions and the driving force behind actions and ways of living are always the same, because they are related to the basic structures of human mind and to their models.
I have projected more than one series of Tarots and I have often interpreted them from the point of view of the body language, with reference to the physio-psychological model of  eastern anatomy and philosophy, where each chakra is related to a specific frequency, hence to a colour and a note.

L’Imperatrice (The Empress). The Tarots, series n. 1
This installation, showed  for the first time at Tempo Reale and then at  the biennial exhibition Nojart,  is made of  three images that recall a contemporain metropolitan Empress, barefoot and grounded on a city road, therefore still in connection with the primitive energy of Earth.
As a counterpoint, along the walls on the path to the Empress, I have placed a number of images of feet hastily moving on wedge-heeled shoes.
The triptych has a red background and the atmosphere is completed by electronic music that I have
composed so that the obsessive rythm of percussions and its bass tone underline the grounding.

Les Tarots, série n.2
1. Les Tarots. L’Impératrice.  2. Les Tarots. La Papesse.
The idea for this second series of Tarots has come from the exhibition Planète Femmes, where the second and the third card of the Major Arcana (The High Priestess and The Empress) has been showed.
The human component, always present in the traditional Tarots, is absent. My intent was to induce the direct perception of the essence of each card, its core and its energetic mark, with no reference to the physical characteristics and to the descriptive elements associated to personification.