Description
Napex 91209 Napoli Explosion
The image almost marble-like appears as the cartographer’s nightmare: a map of fluxes, a territory where luminous traces mimic roads, borders, and reliefs. The wide yellow ribbons become main axes, rivers or energy corridors. Around them, red and green networks draw a geography of intensity, zones of variable density where movements, circulations, and nodes of activity overlap. The white lines, flickering and unstable, act as shifting contours, temporary borders of a space still in formation. Suspended between satellite view and cellular imaging, this cartography oscillates between terrestrial macrocosm and biological microcosm, a territory performed by light. It reads like a reverse grattage of Gerhard Richter: not subtraction but accumulation, a palimpsest built layer by layer. 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.
