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 agricultural history which is transmitted through the christo-pagan rituals, through the blood and the gestures, through the relationship between beings and land. It tries to reproduce an almost tactile experience, suggestive of effort and care, bringing us back to the body as inevitably linked and wholly immersed in the material world.

The images evoke magical elements, incorporating new and ancient superstitions and mythology, potions and imaginary rites of communion and divorce. The interrelation between the photographs transforms the subjects, blurring the boundaries between the material and the symbolic, human beings and the natural world.

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