Suspended

A surreal journey in a Suspended Sicily

What do I photograph and why? What attracts me most? Why does a scene capture my attention? Why does a certain subject become so irresistible? These are the questions I’ve always asked myself since I started taking pictures. The visual field we see is, somehow, a mirror of our own mind. Maybe we truly see our mind. So it is interesting, for me, to use photography in order to see what my mind produces in places that for me are so familiar, as they belong to my homeland. And the result is a sequence of images exploring what is far from the usual Mediterranean or Sicilian stereotypes. These are not winking postcards, conveying a glossed-over image of a land full of art and culture. Neither do we see iconic visions of black-dressed mamas, godfathers and religious festivals. These are visual sketches of my own interior landscapes. Places where “The City is as old as Time and continuous with it”¹, where every place has been (or is going to be) colonized by man-made artifacts. Suspended: between past and future, sky and earth, as suspended as the buildings and structures that seem to grow up, spontaneously, from a common soil. In turning my mindscapes into reality, in choosing my subjects, I’ve created, without a deliberate decision, a time-jumping effect. Passing from the unfinished, to ruins; incomplete buildings and to-be projects. These are reconquered spaces, wounds in the present, delirious projections into the future.

(1) In The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978.

In Suspended there is a splendid and tragic feeling of emptiness, if those two could be mentioned in the same breath, and surreal as well. I like the scale shifts you are seeing with the cars, people, the houses, and the sun-blasted and burnt color of the landscapes and buildings. It shows me a kind of painful beauty in desolation, taking us beyond any hope of recovery. This is good work. Congratulations for staying so true — Joel Meyerowitz, April 2nd 2019

The book

Year: 2006-2021 | Archival Pigment Prints | Optionally mounted on Dibond or Diasec | More Information | Artist Statement