Category: Works

“The Lower World is the title of my long term (2001-2014) photographic project into the dimension of mental illness and within the context of the last fully functioning six criminal lunatic asylums in Italy. Those facilities were eventually shut down in 2015.The work represents an insight into the inmates’ lives and the reality of those asylums .The photos display a certain narrative style, aiming to make mental issues a visually accessible condition as well as offering a constructive contribution to the debate on psychiatric institutions and social exclusion.”

“Bodies chiselled directly from sheer muscle. Premature écorchés. Giants with delicate skin. Bodybuilders, who have been, for a long time now, drawing their strength from the physical performances inherent to athletes, display the image of a Western man half-way between ancient Hercules and modern anatomical models. They show what they have under their skin, their muscles and veins, but nothing more. They want to prove and show what they are able to turn themselves into: deliberately enlarged bodies. Competitions are therefore as many occasions to compare their mussels, to assess, observe and evaluate each other. These competitions are very peculiar shows that celebrate the cult of the body, continuously staged for the public eye. Behind the scene, things are a little different; they go back to speak and move as anyone else. They come back to life. Thus, what happened in the meantime? “

Seloua Luste Bulbina

Lourdes is a special place where people arrive to, not an end in itself, but a gate to a new life.

The most intimate hopes which result from invisible reasons, the sense of belonging to an absolute, the perception of a universal correspondence, drag them to this gate, with their faith, or with the « inescapable irrationality of that faith ».

An inexplicable tension that wants to rejoin the Mystery and that belongs to the dominion of the incredible, of the desperate, of the painful, of the divine. Lourdes is the extreme expression of that desire, a threshold.

Photography is an attempt to explore the unknown, a possible way to reconnect to inspiration, to the Mystery.

Against the violent process of cultural homogenization triggered by globalization and its new productional logics and rhythms, in some corners of the world there are still attempts to preserve a certain lifestyle, traditional forms of social aggregation, habits and very ancient rituals.

Souther Italy is one of these precious receptacles, between the coasts of Calabria and Sicily. Here a sociocultural system centered on the swordfish hunt (pay attention, not fish) resists among growing difficulties.

The hunt for the swordfish is still nowadays the clue of a relationship through which the sacred fear of the unforeseeable and of the power of the sea, gives life to the sacralization of the natural powers to which rites and litanies are offered to obtain a successful ending.

With such respect and technical wisdom the fishermen face the good season when, attracted by the warmth of the sea streams and by the mystery of the reproductive cycle, the xiphias gladius returns in proximity of the shores.