Critical Minerals - Indonesia

May 30, 2024

In the heart of Sulawesi, Indonesia, I found myself capturing the lush beauty of the forest through my lens. Umar suggested avoiding the denser areas as I stepped deeper into the jungle. “There may be snakes,” he warned. Stories of reticulated pythons eating cows and even humans had circulated, much to my surprise. I had always considered the python a slow creature, and I couldn’t imagine being attacked by one of them. On the contrary, I wondered how it might survive with less and less forest to roam. Of course, I hadn’t seen any pythons myself.

A Storyline of Oil and Gas

June 1, 2023

On 27 September 2022, a bubbling gas patch appeared in the Baltic Sea. The enormous methane leak, resembling a huge Jacuzzi in the open sea, was the result of sabotage on Nord Stream pipeline, one of the crucial infrastructures for Europe’s energy supply transporting gas from Russia to Europe. The aerial shot taken by Swedish coastguard authorities looks like a huge white blob spreading across the deep blue Baltic Sea. The image transmitted across all media channels is dramatically reminiscent of the Eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings. [more]

Chapter 8: A Personal Distance “He was sitting at the far end of the counter with a cigarette held loosely between two fingers, not smoking it so much as letting it exist. It was Sukhumi in the autumn of 2008, and the city was in the particular condition of a place that has just received news it had stopped believing would arrive.” […] “The outpost was a Soviet-era structure of concrete block and rough timber. The walls were covered in wallpaper printed with small pale flowers, its pattern faded to near-illegibility, lifting at the seams where the adhesive had long since given way. Some were young enough that the automatic weapons slung over their chairs seemed like objects they had not yet fully absorbed into their sense of themselves.” […] “The fear had an unusual flatness, very cold and very attentive. A sustained, horizontal dread that does not peak and break but simply continues.” […] “The second photograph has never been published. It stayed in the archive not because it is technically inadequate but because it told my story, not the one we had gone to tell.” […] “The closeness that Capa advocated has become a convention. The emotional proximity that was supposed to be a moral condition has, in many cases, become a performance of emotional proximity — the image that looks like empathy without necessarily being produced by it.” […] “The images on that wall were not decorations. They were instructions.” […] “The personal distance, in that context, was not personal at all. It had been decided before anyone arrived.” #writing #photography #distance #whatimageswant #thesecondohoto

Archive rummaging, Kumzar, approx 2018. #straitofhormuz

A new portfolio is out on @exibart, published in occasion of the @milanoartweekofficial. Vast landscapes, oceanic expanses, monumental geology and the slow, relentless mark of human extraction. From the dense human presence of COBALTMAN #1 to the near-abstract aerial stillness of LITHIUM #1, the work moves between scales and registers. And now a new chapter opens: Genea Illogica (2026), a turn toward geographies still miraculously intact, toward what remains when you stop looking at the global system and begin to close the distance. Text by @julietontherouge #criticalminerals #geneaillogica @visualresearch @sonyalphaeu @sony.italia

Aralsk 2017 or Codes 2026

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