Description
Napex 241001 Napoli Explosion
When the sky is covered in threads of gold, something shifts: the spectacle turns into spiritual revelation. In Naples, fireworks are neither entirely profane, nor truly sacred: they constitute an ambiguous ritual, halfway between pagan and devout, popular and sacred. They celebrate the passing of time and, at the same moment, exorcise it, for every anniversary, every New Year’s Eve, is a conspiracy against the passing of time. In a city built upon a crater, these explosions symbolically recall the eruptions of Vesuvius: they celebrate the flash, the terror, and the dangerous beauty of the volcano. Fireworks become an anthropological gesture, a collective catharsis against the ancestral fear of the explosive mountain, a way of making it visible by overturning, for one night, the order of the world, as in carnival. But here, it is gold that imposes itself as a register of the sacred. Napoli Explosion
Napoli Explosion
The window of my bedroom overlooked Mount Vesuvius, and every morning, with reverence, I whispered a good morning to it as one would address a slumbering person, afraid of awakening them. The volcano is a living presence for anyone living at its slopes. For over 12 years, on New Year's Eve, my team and I ascend Mount Faito, a mountain overlooking the Bay of Naples, to capture the extraordinary choreography of lights and colors produced by fireworks all around Vesuvius. Through this superstitious and propitiatory ritual, the people of Naples welcome the new year. The image of the black and silent silhouette of the volcano submerged by the cacophony of fireworks' colors seemed to me a representation that needed to be explored seriously and viewed from different perspectives.
Over the years, the project has evolved into an experimentation of new forms of writing with light, using a unique color palette provided by the hundreds of thousands of fireworks exploding simultaneously. Over time, Napoli Explosion has become a work in search of the feeling of light.
