Essence

2016

Each tree section is a photograph of his diary, in which he diligently noted the small and large changes he faced, from birth to death. In this light, listening to what the woods tell is much like the exercise of understanding other people and oneself. Trees, through their asymmetries, traumas, illnesses, voids, and fullness, become metaphors to describe what lies within us.

The work was made possible thanks to the availability of the University of Padua and the San Vito di Cadore Woods Archive.

WABI SABI

Nothing lasts,
nothing is finished,
nothing is perfect.
Richard R. Powell

The two characters 侘 (wabi) and 寂 (sabi) express a very important concept in the Japanese aesthetic and philosophical tradition.
The founding principle is based on the acceptance of the impermanence of things. What belongs to this worldview is described as having an imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete beauty.

Wabi Sabi is a spatiotemporal zoom-out, a departure from the comfort zones of anthropocentrism, a confrontation between the changes that time imposes. Plants, animals, architectures, objects photographed all over the world in a research of eight years: each element frees itself from the visual context to which it belongs and connects to the rest of the mosaic becoming other, creating suggestions, metaphors.

Changes as imperceptible and rapid as the blink of an eye are shown alongside millennia-old evolutions. In the middle, man, projected in the here and now, ceaselessly engaged in building, transforming, destroying. He is the point of departure and arrival; he, as ephemeral and fragile as his artifacts, is the only one capable of questioning the beginning and end of things, their constant transfiguration.