[poetry of architectural disillusionment]

color photography, diptych, Photography

[poetry of architectural disillusionment]

The city of Pirra (one of Calvino’s many incredible invisible cities), while merely imagined (and not yet visited by the traveler), inhabits a limbo; it is an incorporeal reflection.

In the dynamics of the city of Pirra, the glass grid represents the name “Pirra” or the mental blueprint: a clean, geometric, and predictable structure (the “towers and wide windows” Marco Polo imagined). The distorted reflections, meanwhile, represent the chaotic physical reality that dissolves the rigidity of our imagination. The real world “warps” the straight lines we create in our minds.

My Pirra exists only in a spectral state: it is there, yet intangible.
It exists solely as an image reflected on the glass surface, just as expectations exist only on the surface of our minds.

[Trajectory and belonging]

diptych, Photography

[Trajectory and belonging]
The stones seem to hold the echo of ancient footsteps. Mother and son, in turn, give substance to what time has not erased. Between them, the diptych bridges memory and presence, suggesting that a place is preserved not only in its physical forms but also in the people who continue to inhabit and reinvent it.

The diptych resonates particularly with certain cities in Italo Calvino’s *Invisible Cities*—places where identity is defined not by architecture but by memory, human relationships, and the persistence of time—especially Zaira, the city that “does not tell its past, but contains it.”

In Zaira, memory is inscribed in the streets, corners, walls, and objects, as well as in the stories and experiences of its inhabitants. The idea that “the path remains in the stones” speaks directly to this notion of a city that accumulates traces of the lives that have passed through it.

Cities are made less of stone than of the relationships, memories, and desires layered upon them (I. Calvino)

‘Droplets’ of thought on photography.

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‘Droplets’ of thought on photography.

I have no formal education in art or photography. That is why I always say I am being a photographer rather than being a photographer [by trade].

Today, I simply wanted to share one of the many things photography has taught me over the long years it has been my companion and healer: all a photographer could ever want is for some of those who appreciate their work—at least a few—to feel the same emotion, with the same intensity (or something akin to it in both respects), that the photographer felt while creating it.

I wouldn’t call this a “generous gift” from photography, though, because my own photography is the result of hard, sweaty labor.
I don’t know about yours.
Everyone knows where the shoe pinches.

Image: an overlay of two of my photographs, edited in Snapseed.

Parallel Worlds—an exploration of poetics through photographic diptychs

color photography, diptych

Much like Leandra (one of the most symbolic “invisible cities” imagined by Italo Calvino in his book of the same name), cities are defined not by their architecture or geography, but by the coexistence of spirits—those domestic spirits tied to the memories of families and homes, and those associated with newcomers, displacements, and transformations.
Cities are also formed by layers of memory, affections, customs, and presences accumulated over time.
According to Calvino, urban identity arises from this unstable balance between what endures and what transforms.
………………………….
A diptych from a forthcoming photography book titled Parallel Worlds—an exploration of poetics through photographic diptychs.

For my photography projects centered on memory, territory, and the reinterpretation of landscapes, the city of Leandra offers a particularly rich interpretive key: the photographs can reveal not only what is present in the landscape but also the invisible traces of past occupations and the possibilities of futures yet to unfold.
In this sense, Leandra is a city of superimposed memories and invisible presences that continue to inhabit these places, even when they can no longer be seen.

color photography

[territory of passage]

There was a city where people passed one another without ever stopping: they shared the same sidewalk, the same subway entrance, the same noises, and the same walls covered in graffiti.

Each face appeared for only an instant, like an interrupted sentence. Anyone watching that street corner for hours would believe they were seeing the same city; anyone returning days later would discover that none of the people were the same. The city existed precisely in that movement: an endless succession of encounters that never actually took place.

The invisible city lies not in the architecture or the graffiti, but in the fleeting flow of possible connections.
………………………………….
(inspiration: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities)
photos: polyptych featuring 8 street photos, NYC, 2017

[The memory of territories]

diptych, monochrome photography


No territory is defined solely by what we see in the present.
Its landscape retains traces of past uses, distinct forms of occupation, and vestiges of other eras.

In this place, two memories coexist within the same scene. Brick structures bear witness to the labor, machinery, and people that transformed the material world over the years. Meanwhile, the forest’s reflection in the water reveals another layer of the landscape; trees, branches, and roots evoke a time defined by natural cycles.

These two presences do not cancel each other out. The industrial landscape and the forest reflect different moments in the territory’s history. Together, they demonstrate that a place holds multiple layers of memory. What we see today is the result of the interplay between nature, human activity, and the passage of time.