le montagne hanno gli occhi

The mountains have eyes: for this very reason they do not forget, and perhaps they do not rest either.

Silent, they observe, gather, hoard memories, thoughts, voices. They endure the footsteps that follow one another, the booms that thunder, the traces that hover among the shadows of their trees, their inhabitants, their cold, sharp peaks. The name of the project is its very soul: to remember and not forget, fitting itself into the constant tension that unfolds between a deliberately reticent past and a present that is not reticent enough.

The project follows the voiceless narrative not only of who and what inhabits the mountains, but of the complex relationship that develops between an inhabitant and their land, between institution and citizen, between resistance and belonging. The history of the No TAV movement is the history of a delegitimized people, a mirror of humanity itself which, deprived of contact with nature, seeks it again with all its strength.

The photographic medium can therefore insert itself and merge into this difficult process, collecting the voices, consciences, and memories of those who first had the courage to strip both the living and the non-living of their appearances, to confront them and to make them their own. Frames from amateur videos, technical documents of the project, and newspaper articles alternately interlock in the construction of this new and unprecedented narrative: they are the material proof of the boundary between what is said and what is unsaid, of this silent battle fought against a leviathan that appears omnipotent and a collective voice that is faint yet powerful in its collectivity.

The project thus takes shape as a device for listening. Photography becomes a political act in its apparent neutrality, capable of restoring complexity without simplifying, of holding together unresolved contradictions. Each image is an open question about the concept of progress and development, about the price of territorial sacrifice, about the sense of belonging that indissolubly binds human beings to the place they inhabit.