This unexpected emergence of green – rare in fire, whether pyrotechnic or not – to say nothing of that pink shooting star that seems to tease us from inside the photograph, brings me back to another question, which I entrust to you: why green in the Italian flag? We know the canonical explanations: the green of the uniforms of the Cisalpine Republican Guard, the sentimental reasons, the green of the Risorgimento’s hope, the green of the plains and hills across the peninsula. Yet none of these explanations is sufficient: Italian green is not a colour but a symbolic horizon. And here it unexpectedly appears again in a firework: a reminder that Italy has never defined itself through conquest, but through land, through landscape. Against the black sky of a winter night, the firework speaks the truth of green; and the colours with which Amura saturates his photographs make me dream of all the poems carried by the colours of the world.Napex 25371

Sylvain Bellenger