Il Paesaggio delle Solfare di Sicilia è un progetto fotografico di documentazione territoriale sviluppato come archivio visivo sul paesaggio minerario della Sicilia centrale e meridionale.

A partire dalla metà del XVIII secolo, l’estrazione dello zolfo ha trasformato profondamente l’Altopiano Gessoso Solfifero, dando origine a un sistema industriale diffuso che ha inciso sull’economia, sulla struttura sociale e sulla configurazione del territorio delle province di Caltanissetta, Enna, Agrigento e, marginalmente, Palermo.

Le fotografie sono state realizzate tra il 1988 e il 1992, in coincidenza con la chiusura definitiva delle solfare disposta dalla Regione Siciliana nel 1988. In quella fase molti impianti conservavano ancora strutture e assetti in gran parte integri, conferendo al progetto un rilevante valore di archeologia industriale.

L’archivio documenta infrastrutture estrattive, impianti di lavorazione, villaggi minerari e segni di religiosità popolare, restituendo una visione complessa in cui spazio naturale e intervento umano convivono nello stesso luogo. Il paesaggio che emerge è inteso come memoria storica e culturale di un sistema produttivo oggi scomparso.

Mediterranean Sea is a completed photographic research in which I investigate the sea as a mental, historical, and material space, removing it from any descriptive or narrative dimension.
The Mediterranean does not present itself as a geographical place or a recognizable landscape; it moves beyond vision and immerses itself in a primary perceptual field, where surface, depth, and light coincide.

The images do not seek the event, the horizon, or spectacle. Instead, they focus on a condition of visual suspension, in which the sea becomes a continuous, reflective presence, devoid of coordinates. It is within this condition that the image assumes an atemporal dimension.

Here, matter manifests itself as an unstable substance, capable of recording the passage of light and retaining a deep, stratified memory—one that cannot be reduced to linear historical narration, but is instead rooted in lived and interiorized experience.

Each image emerges from a profound process of reflection. Large-format negatives, subject to deliberate and conscious interventions already at the project stage, even before the moment of exposure, become the site of an imaginary universe composed of stratifications, memories, and experiences lived or absorbed.
These actions, integral to the project, introduce an interpretative level that removes the sea from its iconic function, reconfiguring it as an intimate mental space—one that both transcends and, at the same time, reinforces the meaning of the sea as a place where life, hope, and tragedy coexist.

Mediterranean Sea is situated within my broader research on the interpretation of landscape as an inner form and as a perceptual experience, in continuity with works devoted to silence, matter, and the suspension of the image.
The project is conceived as a unified corpus, intended for both exhibition and editorial form, and proposes a visual reflection on the Mediterranean understood not as a boundary, but as a shared mental space—atemporal and profound.

Sicily is a land that never allows itself to be fully grasped. An enigma of shadows and flashes of light, a threshold that opens and closes again on those who attempt to cross it.
It is a territory that does not present itself as a stable form, but as an unstable experience, traversed by light and abyss.

Verga once observed that life is a tumble. I often think that the Island is nothing other than this: a continuous descent between clarity and darkness.
I move through it as one moves through a labyrinth, aware that each path holds a time that does not return.

Following Pirandello, I believe that truth does not reside in a single dream, but in many dreams. It is within this restless multiplicity that my gaze takes shape.
For me, the land is never a landscape to be contemplated, but a lived, total space, often indecipherable. A matter that is constantly transforming, and that calls for a slow, almost ascetic form of listening.

The land reveals itself as openness, as errancy, as a question.
Here the thought of Heidegger comes into view: Die Lichtung ist die Öffnung — the clearing is the opening. It is in the clearing of light that the world, for a moment, shows itself and, in showing itself, withdraws.

In Sicily this occurs continually. Light does not illuminate; it occurs.
It cuts, unsettles, and reveals the unexpected. It shapes ways of living even before ways of seeing. Photography can only draw sustenance from these often unsettled atmospheres.

From this awareness emerges my trilogy: landscape, sea, and cities.
Three chapters of the same unease:
– the landscape preserves what remains unspoken,
– the sea holds the infinite,
– the cities breathe the echo of vanished presences.

Beyond every place and every history, a tension emerges that exceeds the Island’s physical reality: a metaphysical dimension.
A movement that goes beyond physical space and beyond the thought that seeks to comprehend it.

It is within this excess that my research acquires a universal dimension: in the moment when light, matter, and shadow touch and generate a possible world—a world that exists only in the instant in which I look at it.

Perhaps this is the true centre of my photography: a land that never ceases to question, a light that opens questions, a way of seeing that coincides with a mode of being.
And at the point where all this converges, a threshold opens—the only one in which the image can truly come into being.

Imaginary Landscape is a photographic research in which I progressively distanced the landscape from its geographical dimension in order to lead it into a mental and perceptual space.
These are not imaginary places, but real landscapes transformed through vision, time, and the photographic process, until they lose any descriptive function.

In this body of work, the landscape is no longer observed as a scene or a context, but as an unstable visual structure, in which forms are simplified, rarefied, or dissolved.
The image emerges from a continuous tension between recognizability and abstraction, between what remains legible and what escapes naming.

The landscape thus becomes an inner place, a field of projection in which memory, perception, and experience overlap.
Photography does not return a territory, but a dilated and suspended time, in which reality is held and transformed into vision.

Imaginary Landscape represents a fundamental phase of my artistic trajectory, in which landscape definitively ceases to be representation and becomes perceptual experience.
This research anticipates and prepares the subsequent works devoted to silence, matter, and the suspension of the image, marking a decisive passage toward a conception of landscape as an inner form.