Vetriolo

Vetriolo explores the underground as a physical and symbolic space. Inspired by the alchemical V.I.T.R.I.O.L., the project reflects on descent, darkness and the search for what lies beneath the surface.

There is a world I cannot see. I do not know where it is, whether in front of my own eyes or beneath the ground I walk on, hidden among tunnels or crevices unreachable by light. Somewhere, I am told, among brambles and rocks, there are openings, like portals, where in past centuries the miners of this area searched for stones and precious minerals. Thomas shows me a large dark rock and asks me to shine my torch on it. It glitters with countless white specks, like stars in a black sky that swallows them. He points to one part: fool’s gold. It appears as something it is not. There is always the risk of getting lost, of being misled, of finding nothing. In the past, the inhabitants of this area would return from the woods carrying white or violet amethyst druses in their hands, as elsewhere they might have carried bouquets of flowers and herbs. The underground is full of them; it is a mosaic of solids and voids upon which I walk without realizing it. Thomas tells the story of a soldier, perhaps only a legend, lost in one of these passages. Of what he was searching for, and whether he found anything at all, no trace remains. I receive a stone as a gift, place it in the pocket of my jacket, and resume my path. The forest grows denser, the light fades.

VETRIOLO originates from the exploration of a landscape marked by ancient mining passages and hidden cavities. Beneath an apparently ordinary natural surface lies an unseen network of tunnels and voids.

The title draws from the alchemical acronym V.I.T.R.I.O.L. (Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem), an invitation to descend into the interior of the earth in order to encounter what is concealed. The project adopts this movement inward as both method and orientation. The work moves between the surface and the underground, light and obscurity, visibility and disappearance, where geological traces, legends and fragments of memory intersect within a terrain structured as much by absence as by matter.