Projects: statements
Hungry of Flowers: a Dark Comedy
(new project, 2025)
These images are born from the processing - with the help of PS A.I - of pre-existing digital photos of my work in progress I&I Ice and Ikebana finalist IPA and TIFA 2022. At the time, the idea was to create a metaphor for the natural cycle of freezing and thawing and the photographic process. The thawing of the glaciers was already forcefully underway, even with deadly consequences. Now it is clear that many people and animals will have to leave their land submerged by water, or their ice disappeared, and that the World will not be as before. Even the cycle, albeit accelerated, of freezing and thawing will no longer exist, and I imagine that men, animals and fish may have to change their diet. This apocalyptic prediction is the basis of the project.
Suddenly, dancing like elves, they burst into my dream world of graceful and exciting frozen flowers, figures of wild and free beasts, to remind us that Nature is not only poetry and poetic resilience, but also hunger, destruction, irrationality. The photographic freeze is broken by the generation of uncontrollable and subversive creatures. Nature itself is upset with or without our help.
These absurd images could make you smile, or be considered as a sort of "dark comedy". But I, who have always loved the humorous side of events, want to make you reflect on their meaning, on the upheaval of the Planet that this metaphorical banquet represents
Diving African Masks
(new project, 2025)
African masks have always fascinated me, in a sort of artistic "mal d'Africa": it is this fascination that immediately gave birth to images of masks in my vision of some vertically oriented photos in my abstract work begun in 2024 on the shores of the Greek island of Leros in the Aegean. My imaginative "visions" were then supported by the AI of photo editing.
"Mass & Energy" , "Marine Suggestions"
(new projects, 2024)
In these projects, I moved toward a more abstract vision, to explore with more freedom the ever changing interactions between solids, light waves and liquid waves. As already in my previous work "Iced Ikebanas" , I feel music and images going together.
My intention was to explore at close range (technically called “macro” photography) the poetry that can be born from the encounter between the sea waves, the sunlight and the stones of the coasts that I found during the very hot European summer of 2024.
I wanted to create abstract images, and in the very short time to capture the light refractions arising from the passage of the wave on the stones I could not and did not want to capture Chinese or Japanese pictograms, as is possible in other modalities with more static subjects: I mean, I did not want to create something as the well-known fascinating series "Paysages, Camargue, marécages" by Lucien Clergue, the French photographer founder of the photographic "Rencontres" of Arles (link to the official website of L. Clergue: https://lucien-clergue.com/paysages-camargue-marecages/). The beauty and poetry of those "landscapes" created by Clergue are impressive: reminding that work - that I did not have in mind when I started this new project on "Mass and Energy" - encouraged me to go on the project, dispelling my doubts about the shallowness of the idea.
There are in my last projects two different worlds : a colorful landscape and a monochrome scenery, as I show you in two galleries: "Mass & Energy " (color) and "Marine Suggestions" (monochrome).
Defrost
( Ice & Ikebanas )
(Finalist, International Photo Awards 2022, and Tokio International Foto Awards 2022)
An open project on frozen and thawed wildflowers, a poetic research that wants to be a cry of pain for the collapse of the glaciers caused by the global warming of Planet Earth. On July 3 of this year 2022, in Italy, a piece of the Marmolada glacier collapsed, killing people hungry for its beauty. A month before, foreseeing tragedy, I started to create the photos for this project on global warming: preserving the poignant poetry of wild flowers, which I collected in different areas, in different seasons, frozen and thawed. Wildflowers are a symbol of drought resilience, and also of Sapiens, survivors of the great climatic changes in their history. By an unpremeditated coincidence, the acronym of the English title recalls the self-defeating egocentrism of the Sapiens, which create and destroy, freeze and thaws.
Two years ago, on Sunday 3 July 2022, the collapse of a “tower” from the Marmolada glacier near Punta Rocca caused many casualties among the people thirsty for its beauty: with my particular sensitivity, I had sensed the possibility of the event a month earlier and had begun in June 2022 a symbolic and poetic work on the thawing of the wildflowers that I collect and freeze.
Two years later, in 2024, the disaster was deemed “unpredictable”, the red zone was revoked and the area is continuously monitored. But the Marmolada glacier, the largest in the Dolomites, is now a glacier in an irreversible coma. Since 1888 it has retreated by 1,200 meters and with an increase in the altitude of the front of 3,500 meters. In the last five years it has lost 70 hectares of surface area, equal to 98 football fields, going from about 170 hectares in 2019 to 98 in 2023. At this rate, by 2040, or even earlier, the Marmolada glacier will no longer exist.
Terroirs
( Juror's pick selection LensCulture B&W Awards 2021; Monochrome Award 2022)
The name “Terroirs” is widespread among professionals and enthusiasts of quality wine products.
I could have called the project "Harvesters", but I chose the name "Terroirs", with a bitter irony, to stress the contrast between the name and whoever supplies the workforce of one of the most renowned products of the Winelands of South Africa. This open project, started in 2014, is still going in the Western Cape, mainly in the “Terroirs” of the Huguenot Valley. Here the workforce, is made up of black Africans, coming from various parts of Africa, not only from the Western Cape. The harvesters are recruited from intermediaries who usually do not collect but merely control the harvest.
Most harvesters are young women, who sometimes arrived with elegance and sensuality.
I found in them a sense of aggregation and belonging to a community, rather than an attachment to the territory.
I present the images in a non-chronological order.
In the early four years, until 2018, I mostly saw on the “terroirs” locally born people. Over the past three years, the arrival of workers from Malawi has sparked a wave of cheer that was lacking in Western Cape.
The project, started as a story of harvesters, directed soon to transmit to represent their resilience and humanity.
In photographing, I am very interested in the theatricality of human actions: in this project, the harvesters' performances have the fields and mountains of the Winelands of South Africa as their fifth and backdrop.
The Last Ritual
(Commended in Tokyo International Foto Awards 2022)
The Italian director P.P. Pasolini considered football "The last sacred ritual of our time". This ritual also inspired Paolo Sorrentino's recent film, "The Hand of God". In South Africa, the national sport of white and colored Afrikaners has always been rugby. But football remains the passion of black people, and I can see how great is the passion of children and young people playing on the fields, without any institutional help. The hand of God is otherwise invisible, just as the object of desire - - the sacred ball - - is not seen in my images.
W.W.W. ...... Who Watches Whom
(Winner, IPA Photobooks 2021, Category People )
I want to show my irresistible attraction for the spectacle offered by the spectators in all events.
In my work, the participation and intrinsec theatricality of spectators, which brings down the "fourth wall" between artists and the public, becomes my participation too, and puts me on the fil rouge that underlies the mass of spectators and unites us to the artists on stage.
Many photos from different music or sport events are assembled together for a physical "fusion : I want to emphasize the importance of real encounters, as opposed to "social networks", result-cause of social distance.
Islanders
Since my tweens, I have strongly felt my origin, physical and cultural, from Greece. And in adulthood, I continued to pursuit this link, which led me in 2014 to the publication of a photobook: "Ulysses’ Gaze”, dedicated to the film-maker Angelopoulos. Ulysses, my Avatar, is the symbol of, humanity pursuing knowledge, as wrote Dante Alighieri in his poem “Comedia”. My main interest in the project then was and still is to show the lifestyle and the world of the islanders.
In February of the current year, I self-published the photobook "Greek Islands"from which the images I present are taken. Twelve: the number of islands in the Dodecanese archipelago, and also the years passed since my arrival by sailing boat in the archipelago. And finally, I have choiced twelve themes to present the images of this open project. “Greek Islands ” is still showing the Ulysses’ gaze in Dodecanese.
“The men and women of these images inhabit their place without enchantment, stuck hot inside the ring of beauty, which is not powder, paint, flicker. Beauty is substance, strength and adventure of waves. Here the residents are surrounded by the element that is the majority of the planet. Therefore the island, and not the mainland, is in the image and likeness of the world” ( from the comment by Erri De Luca, italian novelist, translation Jeffrey Kennedy).
Minority Report
It is now a widespread belief that when we talk about peoples or cultures in danger of extinction, such as about lions and other fascinating non-humans beings, future generations will most likely only know them through the images that will remain. I have put all my empathy into entrusting the memory of the semi-nomadic Himba people, threatened by the transnational dam project on the Cunene River between Namibia and Angola, to images. Each image is intended to be a painful photographic haiku in their memory.
Vertigo
In this work, I show my vision of people on the top of Table Mountain,Cape Town, South Africa, by an IR modified camera, that allows the IR light to give its contribution to the scene. I feel a particular intoxication in even moderate altitudes, because in my childhood I loved climbing, and once I fell from a branch. It took me several years to climb back up without feeling a helpless vertigo, which has now turned into a subtle pleasure, like tasting a forbidden fruit.