The Mountain is an enchanted place where human beings are confronted with the mystery of their own existence: being simultaneously outside and inside nature. Expelled from Eden, man still exercises the divine right of master over all the beasts and plants to which he has given names. But man works the land with his own sweat and he is destined to return to the land.
There is no place where the illusion of human omnipotence is so fragile as at the foot of Vesuvius, according to Leopardi. The potential catastrophe underlies the telluric life of its inhabitants, always on the verge of fading. They tame it as they can by calling it mountain.
The project, carried out over three years, follows the traces of an ancient agricultural history that is transmitted in Christo-pagan rituals, in blood and gestures, in the relationship between beings and the earth. It manifests itself in an almost tactile experience that recalls effort and care and brings us back to the body as inevitably linked and fully immersed in the material world.
The images evoke magical elements by incorporating superstitions and mythology, potions and imaginary rites of communion and divorce. The photographs are recalled in a game of correspondences that transfigures the subjects, making the boundaries between the material and the symbolic, between the human being and the natural more blurred.
Vesuvius, almost invisible in the images, remains a constant but underground presence, silent but alive, hidden, lurking.