Added Feb 11, 2024
This photo introduces a short series of images, shot in analogue and freely inspired by a musical piece by Cattivi Costume. It collects lost glances, blurry faces that leave a mark without ever managing to delimit their features. In the anonymity of a suspended and desolate time there is a silent humanity, eternally waiting, made up of fragments of life and stories without any name that intertwine in a mosaic of solitudes and in an apparently casual meeting with no more past. "Sleepless men" who, trying to monitor the world and the sense of truth, have fallen into the trap caused by their own desires, transforming themselves into cold figures, wandering souls, lost and forgotten. No voice, no call or scream at the top of their lungs or arms waving in the wind and pitying eyes can no longer bring them back to a state of wakefulness.
Formless faces that are lost in the mist of an endless night, appear like a lightless shadow that wanders aimlessly in a lifeless city. Souls without peace that are consumed without sleep in a senseless world that searches for a voiceless art and shows itself without emotion on a wall devoid of color.
The photograph turns into a barbed wire cage ready to lock the text in a paper prison. It shows us that there is no limit to division, separation, fracture, fragment but there is always a wall, a network, a barrier that creates new cracks and other insurmountable distances. What choice is there in such a scenario? Which side of the network are you on? What tragic irony weighs on the weak will of the "sleepless man"?
Here, in this imagined world, a longing for clarity, the memory of the way of smiling, is given only as a trace on a crumbling wall, an emblem of weakness and at the same time also strength of the memory, which, however, falters, yes deteriorates, rotates with ever narrower trajectories around the edge of an abyss, still leaving its indelible mark to shine through. All around is just a field of rubble, just enough to fill the scene, a pure and simple visual correlate.
Halfway along this path characterized by a dreamlike dimension and which takes on the appearance of increasingly blurred faces along irrelevant landscapes, I imagined a possible change of perspective: if instead of "sleepless man" these clouded features were nothing more than puppets, old props abandoned in front of the backdrop of a difficult to decipher reality? What if the truth was elsewhere? Far beyond the narrow and geometric space of the paper where have I drawn these signs?
Mists of dreams, meanwhile, insist on taking care of a world that escapes the gaze as it dissolves. Those looking for meaning and identity get lost in the indistinct and uncertain while dreamlike visions are confused between reality and fantasy, between light and darkness. Faceless shadows wander in places without a name and without history, masks of humanity hide the true essence of individuals. Empty and lost looks do not find a destination or hope. Distortions of the mind create an effect of vertigo and anguish, just as those who live in this foggy mist must feel fragile and alone.
The sleepless man chose to live in this strange condition in the hope of being able to dialogue with the things of the world, as if they spoke to him a secret language that, in the normal state of wakefulness and attention, we cannot perceive. However, this has led it to separate itself more and more from that principle of demarcation that allows us to distinguish between objects, fictions, imagination and from those pure concepts of the intellect such as quantity, quality, relationship or modality.
So the enigmas piled up: here, at this time, under that particular light there was someone and, at the same time, there was no sense in being precisely in this place, at that precise moment. They have become photographs that underline an absence even before a presence, perhaps a trace that is less easy to erase remains, but never a presence, an authentic memory or a desire carved in the stone of memory.
At the end it is the contrast between reality and illusion that emerges, between nature and man, between light and shadow. The blurred face in the foreground will still represent the illusion, the man, the shadow. An evanescent, indefinite, anonymous presence that overlaps with reality, but does not erase it. A forest in the background represents reality, nature, light, a clear, detailed, identifiable scene that resists illusion, but does not reject it. He asks us to continually question who we are, where we come from and where we are going. He offers us a poetic and mysterious vision of life.