The Plant

Last year events, together with a profound feeling of loneliness, have left us with proofs of the consequences of our impact on the world. Not only on the ecosystem we inhabit, but also on our very survival as a species. On the contrary, this last year had also shown us that there are chances to heal and thrive for the earth without us. In recent history, such a threat of annihilation, coming from something so small, has an equal only in nuclear catastrophes.

The Plant is an ongoing project, currently set nearby Montalto di Castro’s former nuclear plant, but meant to be made of photographs from others former nuclear and power plants, to create a composite image of a potential and unspecified place. A potential landscape that is yet partly already existing.

To depict it, the work refers to the the post-atomic movies imagery and to the documentary photographs of nuclear experiments, adopting their visual languages. Alluding to the countless images from documents and movies on the subject, the use of the flash simulates the glow of an explosion and reveals the microcosm of what lays in front of the camera. At the same time, however, it betrays the lonely presence of the photographer, alone in an otherwise uninhabited landscape. Thus, an artificial light is superimposed on the natural one, in the useless act of freezing, within the photographic instant, a sunset that inevitably preludes to the night.