looks at the traces of violent change in Alpine mountains. Once considered powerful and stable

natural objects, in recent years we have become aware of their fragility, the outcome of violent

evolution and the damage caused by human intervention. As an expression of aesthetic and political

concerns, I wonder whether there is anything we can do to repair the wounds. Can I, as an artist,

imagine a non-invasive visual strategy of healing?

Breaks/Kintsugi has allowed me to explore photography as a language, its long history and

materiality, and to expand its richness, when it was hailed as an “objective” witness of what exists

around us, an instrument that “freezes” a moment in the flux of time, and a technique for producing

countless and therefore widely available material prints.

In the final version, images are paired: the image on the left records the outcome of natural and

human change; I have stressed some fractures, or wounds, by embossing the paper in the printing

phase. The image on the right attempts to show some healing: I have filled the embossments with

fragments of stone, resorting to the practice of Kintsugi, a way to repair fractures without hiding the

scars left on the objects. The final result is somehow a third object, which is neither the original

version of the scene documented in the photograph, nor a fictional creation.

The printed method I have chosen is constitutive of the project itself: I have expressed the intense

“materiality” and “historicity” of photography and of the subject matter I have chosen by using a

photogravure technique applied to a polymeric base, in the footsteps of XIXth and early XXth

century photogravures. As was the case with those older works, each “print” I produce is unique. I

can indeed produce as many as I want or can, but my hope is to contribute to the conversation

about the role of the singular work of art in contempphotographic practice,going beyond its

classical interpretation as typical of “the age of mechanical reproduction” and addressing,

indirectly, the issues raised by today’s stochastic AI creation.