CRITICAL MINERALS - DRC

September 11, 2023

The third leg of the 'Critical Minerals' project took me to the Democratic Republic of Congo to document the condition and impact of the mining of Copper and Cobalt, essential for the green energy transition.

The environmental and human conditions of mining have been widely reported, and the mainstream narrative faithfully describes the devastating working conditions, the quasi-slave-like exploitation and the problematic health, environmental and economic conditions that men, women, and often children are subjected to, directly or indirectly involved in mining. […]

Chapter 4: The dinner. There is a very particular quality to political waiting. Your presence has been requested and yet you are reminded in every moment that you are contingent, provisional, that your time has less weight than the schedule of the man you are about to meet.[…] I felt it was a sequence in Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark.” […] The porcelain, he learns in that instant, does not exist to be admired by him. It exists as part of a ritual whose centre is elsewhere: the sovereign, the performance of power. […] When I asked him to look into the lens, he ignored me entirely, keeping his gaze fixed somewhere beyond the frame, lips drawn into a tight, almost private smirk. […] A picture made on the edge of refusal. […] Back in Moscow, in the months that followed, the cracks in that narrative became impossible to ignore. […]I began to recognise in our private life the same pattern I saw in the city: things that looked fine from the outside but felt, inside, permanently on the verge of something.[…] It becomes an index of a much larger network of relationships: between ruler and ruled, between spectacle and consent, between the projections we make and the realities we inhabit. […] if I worked enough, photographed enough, delivered enough, the rest would fall into place.[…] There is a temptation, when you work with images for a living, to trust them more than you trust your own sensations. A photograph is something you can hold, edit, sequence; an intuition is not.[…] To play with images is to live in that tension constantly. You learn to ask, whenever you look at a photograph: what is being presented, and what is being left out? Whose interests does this particular framing serve? […] There is a word in Italian, “annebbiamento”, that captures something of this: a fogging-over, a blurring of perception. It happens on windshields, on lenses, on winter mornings when you exhale and see your breath. It also happens, less visibly, in the mind. […] Reality is no less capable of self-deception than any photograph. #whatimageswant

Chapter 6: Green Circles As I delved into Lenin’s years in Switzerland, another narrative emerged to challenge this exercise. Behind the official desk and podium photos lay testimony of two women who shaped his private life. […] a man sustained by two women who saw him in different, overlapping ways. […]A green circle appeared around her next Instagram story the next day. A signal no larger than a fingernail, yet it opened a room: a private corridor carved inside a public architecture. A gesture so slight it could be dismissed as a habit, carrying an unmistakable tremor of recognition: you, not the others. […]”Close Friends” is a technological articulation of intimacy, […]A private story shared with a restricted list confirms this: a photograph becomes controlled intimacy: limited in visibility, amplified in implication, an expectation placed on the viewer. […]Affection required nothing. It arrived unmediated, unargued, undeserved. I responded, always, but never completely. I offered the version of myself the screen could accommodate: attentive, articulate, emotionally literate. […] She stayed near, gently, but offered neither acceptance nor refusal: a presence that held me neither up nor down. I mistook her softness for possibility, reading encouragement where there was restraint. […]What remains aren’t memories but exposures: the curve of her back, the tremor in her voice, the tenderness of a vanishing message: moments that never formed a full narrative but an archive of unfinished possibilities. #whatimageswant

I do like wine, but I never imagined it could become the subject of a personal reflection on relationships. “Perno, Genea Illogica” started as a collaboration with @cantina_piemontese , a series of pleasant stays at @castellodiperno , and evolved into approaching the vineyard not as a scenic backdrop, but as a constructed and disciplined space. The #langhe become a field of observation where geometry, repetition and regulation shape vegetal life, revealing structures that echo emotional and relational systems. Vines are guided, tied and bent to follow a predetermined logic. Yet within this controlled framework, friction emerges: asymmetries, deviations, moments of resistance. This tension between order and drift forms the conceptual core of the project. It mirrors the dynamics of intimate relationships, where attempts at stability coexist with emotional pressure, imbalance and silent transformation. The “perno,” the pivot, functions both structurally and symbolically. It is the point around which relationships rotate and change, whether with the land, with another person, or with oneself. Photography, in this context, does not aim to describe or document. It becomes a way of translating external structures into internal states, turning space into a form of thought. Only on the surface is this a project about wine and vineyards. More deeply, it reflects on how we live within the systems we create, and how something persistently human resists complete order. Curated by: @chiaraot @nannifontana Prints: @imagofineart #wine #geneaillogica #relationship @sony.italia @alphauniversebysony.eu

Trump’s Arctic strategy is back in headlines with Greenland in focus. A decade ago the Arctic was already strategic and I spent a month on a cargo sailing on the North East Passage. If you want to know more click on the link in bio. #greenland #arctic #stategicarctic #russia

Chapter 2: A Transition in Lybia. “Almost a year earlier, in March 2011, I had stood in a place called Ajdabiya. The landscape looked unfinished, as if the violence had scraped away the thin veneer of civilisation.”[…] “Three red chairs arranged in a loose semicircle, their fabric torn, their legs half-buried in the rubble. A burnt-out car leaned on its side like a ribcage. A tree, stripped of its leaves, arched over the scene with a kind of skeletal grace.”[…] “I lifted my camera and framed the scene only when it was empty, mute. I recorded absence, framing out any possible sign of ‘happening’.”[…] “The road to Tripoli was nothing more than a long strip of asphalt stitched to the edge of the Libyan desert. It became the axis around which the entire war seemed to rotate.”[…]“Progress in Libya was always provisional, always reversible. The country inhaled and exhaled its front lines with the inconsistency of an unsteady tide.” […] “After a week of this ritual, Libya’s war began to feel like a loop. What unsettled me was not the danger, but the monotony.”[…] “When we arrived at the aftermath of an ambush, the air was still hot from the fire. Standing over the body, I did not see a person. I saw a composition. Lines. Angles.”[…]“At the time, I told myself that numbness was a requirement of the job. Later, I did understand that numbness is also a message.”[…] “I had believed that images created understanding. Instead, they reflected my projections more readily than the lives of others.” […]“Revolutions are not metaphors. They do not purify; they fracture.”[…] “On my last night, I booked a one-way ticket to Moscow, without knowing whether it would free me or return me to the ruins I was trying to escape.” #writing #libya #warphotography #distance #memory images

Chapter 5: Qana “I arrived without method, without the accumulated instincts that guide the body before the mind comprehends why.” […] “In Lebanon, I found no war as I’d imagined war. Violence descended suddenly from above, struck, and vanished back into the sky. Our cameras captured only the evidence left behind. The danger was felt rather than seen.” […] “I could not raise my camera and I did not. It was not discomfort that stopped me. It was the composure. The scene did not resolve itself into a frame.” […] “She lay on woollen blankets, arms slightly outstretched, her dress unwrinkled, betraying no evidence of violence. Only stillness where life should have been.” […] “We insult each other so that the words will no longer hurt.” […] “The war ended. The exercises continued, even when the reasons for them were no longer clear.” #whatimageswant #perceptionofimages #writingimages

Chapter 3: The Arctic. “I wake before the ship wakes… an hour when the metal belly of the vessel holds its breath, and the half-dark makes the room look like a badly exposed photograph: flat, washed out, indecisive.” […] “The Nordic Odyssey is an eighty-storey building turned on its side and made to float, 180 mt. of steel moving through a world reduced to water, sky, and ice.” […] “There is no internet on board. Every message off the ship passes through the captain. Communication is not a private act here. It is a request.” […] “This is the first lie I tell myself on this journey: that distance will clarify what proximity has confused.” […] “Sometimes I shoot as an act of faith: that the world, in its emptiness, is still worth recording, or maybe that I am.” […] “Ice doesn’t negotiate. It yields, or it breaks. Watching the ship force its way through feels both powerful and pathetic.” […] “Distance doesn’t purify. It magnifies. She exists now only through interruption and silence. I exist through waiting.” […] “Her silence had taken on the texture of the horizon: flat, endless, available to be misread in every direction.” […] “She had never stopped reaching out. I had mistaken silence for rejection, absence for indifference. The distance I blamed on her was mine.” […] “And perhaps this is the real cost of looking: realising too late how much of what you see is shaped by the weather inside you.” #theperceptionofimages #whatimageswant #writing #images

It was late afternoon in Zürich, one of those pale February days that hang in the air like a held breath rather than a season.[…] All week, the news had been trailing reports of Russian troop movements, long columns of armoured vehicles snaking eastward, makeshift camps erupting like ulcers on the Ukrainian border.[…]“It won’t happen,” I insisted, tipping the thin orange slice in my glass so that the rim caught the light.[…]For years, I believed that if I stared at a place long enough, at an event long enough, at a single face long enough, I could unravel its hidden logic. I depended on images to bridge the abyss between curiosity and understanding. Yet that afternoon in Zürich, I felt the familiar lie slip free: images are not certainties but examinations, they are ambiguous by nature, and sometimes they lie.[…]In the vast archives of his Swiss sojourn, one precious image of the man survives, revealing him as more than a revolutionary icon: a quiet moment of domesticity, strolling through the Zürichberg hills with his wife, pausing to savour a piece of local chocolate. A singular snapshot of humanity. […]Three days later, on February 22, I awoke to a storm of notifications on my phone: Kyiv had been struck at dawn, and the invasion was underway.[…]And yet on July 9, we found ourselves beneath the blistering Sicilian sun on the island of Pantelleria, waves lapping gently against volcanic black rocks, when love, an exhausted truce, made us parents.[…]And just like that, the twin catastrophes, global and intimate, coalesced into a single, shattering realisation: the narratives we construct to anchor our daily lives can crumble in an instant, leaving only the echo of a silence more potent than all the noise that came before.[…]For twenty-five years, my world has been made of images. Images I’ve pursued, crafted, and waited for.[…]I’ve been an observer hiding behind my device. Flusser calls the photographer an “apparatus functionary,” a simple executor of visual algorithms. But what if the apparatus isn’t only technical but attitudinal? What if my detached style is really an unconscious defence against my own vulnerability? […]

In this small clearing among the woods, I’ve spent days over the past three years thinking, reading, lighting the stove. I’ve reflected on the many emotions that have passed through these seasons — relationships and storms, surprises and silences, the meaning of work and love, loss and renewal. San Vi’ – Genea Illogica is a quiet work: an artist book of 186 copies and three portfolio sets of 22 platinum prints (20×25 cm). It turns inward, tracing the invisible lines between memory and presence, belonging and change — between what we inherit and what we choose to become. It was born from a collaboration with a friend, bound by the strange coincidence of living through different storms at the same time, in different ways. The work, and the place itself, became a metaphor of friendship and generosity, of roots and rediscovery, of silence that holds both absence and grace. Last night, we shared the book for the first time, during a concert by @abulmogard and @grandriver.aimee beneath the same light that still lingers over these woods. #GeneaIllogica #SanVi2025 #ArtistBook #PlatinumPrints #FineArtPhotography #Memory #Landscape #Friendship #DavideMonteleone #ContemporaryPhotography #ArtBook #PoeticDocumentary #BlackAndWhitePhotography @massimonicolaci @luce.works @just_fraenz

San Vi’ 2025 – Genea Illogica, Part 1. For most of my career, I’ve photographed systems : energy corridors, economies, extractive frontiers and human conditions. Projects like Sinomocene and Critical Minerals – Geography of Energy asked how to render vast, evasive mechanisms visible. I learnt to braid images with maps and research, to cross geographies, to hold a disciplined distance so the work stayed legible. That craft has weight — but it also became a habit, a way to keep myself far from what hurts. Genea Illogica is a turn inward — not in ambition, but in orientation. It began from a personal dislocation: becoming a father and aiming to understand how my personal relationships worked—a slow need to find roots where there were none. Marcel Proust compared the soul to a dark forest, its branches intertwined with genealogical trees — a place of memory, emotion, and inheritance. In these woods of San Vi’, between mist and silence, I started to understand that metaphor. “Siamo arrivati alla panchina e ci siamo seduti lì. C’era davvero molta luce… E ho pensato alle mie tante commozioni di questi mesi stando seduto qui, a questa enorme stanza con i muri di siepe, alle piccole, tremule foglie di aprile, ora verdi-dorate, consunte, seccate dal vento. Così pensavo e non mi sentivo infelice.” This project is personal — made for a friend, with a friend, who became important in my life. A dialogue between ancestry and present, between loss and growth — between what is given, and what we choose to become. #GeneaIllogica #SanVi2025 #Photography #ContemporaryPhotography #FineArtPhotography #BlackAndWhitePhotography #Memory #Landscape #Proust #DavideMonteleone #platinumprints @luce.works