The Mountain

There is no place where the illusion of human omnipotence is so fragile as on the slopes of Vesuvius. Potential catastrophe underlies its inhabitants everyday lives. They tame it calling it mountain.

The Mountain is an enchanted place where humankind comes face to face with the mystery of its own existence: being at once inside and outside of nature. Banished from Eden, man still exercises the divine right of ownership over beasts and plants which he’s named. But humans work the land with their own sweat and to the land they’re destined to return.

There is no place where the illusion of human omnipotence is so fragile as on the slopes of Vesuvius. Potential catastrophe underlies its inhabitants everyday lives. They tame it as they can calling it mountain.

The project follows the traces of an ancient rural history transmitted through christo-pagan rituals, blood and gestures, in the relationship between beings and earth.

The images evoke magical elements incorporating superstitions, mythology, and imaginary rituals of communion and divorce, blurring the distinction between the material and symbolic, the human and the natural.  It's a reflection on a specific place as well as on the role of man in today's world.

Vesuvius, almost invisible in the series, is a constant but subterranean presence, silent but alive, hidden, lying in waiting.