My work is an ongoing body of photographic images created through years of observing the night sky. Every image begins with light that has travelled for centuries or even millennia before reaching the camera. I am not trying to reproduce the sky. I need the reality of having observed it. From there, observation, transformation and imagination become part of the same movement.
It began more than ten years ago, one night when I pointed a camera at the sky. What started as fascination gradually became a practice. I taught myself astronomy and astrophotography, learning to find my way through the sky with star maps, books and observation.
At first, I wanted accuracy. I wanted to understand what I was looking at and to photograph it as precisely as I could.
Then came the images I considered wrong.
They did not correspond to what I had intended to photograph. At first they were failures. But some of them made me stop. The error was not the work. It changed the way I looked. Instead of correcting the deviation, I chose to follow it.
What began there is no longer accidental. My process is intuitive, but it is intentional. I isolate minute areas of the recorded image and enlarge them until their original scale becomes uncertain. I follow what appears, make a choice, transform it, look again, sometimes go back or abandon an image entirely. The result is unpredictable, but the process is deliberate.
I am not a scientist; I use science as I use my camera and telescope: as a way of looking. It gives me the point from which the image begins. It does not determine where I have to stop. The artwork is not the sky, nor a star, nor a JPEG file. It is the result of looking for a long time, with passion and obsession, chasing beauty and trying to catch it.
When I look up, I see space as it surrounds us: an immense stranger, still so enigmatic, and yet the space we are part of. This stranger embraces us. Humans have always waged war over what sets them apart. This relationship to the other is our inevitable condition. And yet, it is this very idea that unites all of humanity. Across the earth, thousands of kilometres apart, at the very same moment, utterly different human beings can look at the same star. The otherness that divides us on earth is the one that unites us in the sky.
What I work from has no matter of its own: light, wind, the gas of a planet. And yet, the forms I create from it feel strangely familiar, close to the first signs of life, a cell, an embryo, what we carry within us as living beings of the same cosmos. When I let myself imagine freely, what they evoke could be what survives us, or what came before us. They awaken something of our idea of life, of birth, of eternity; almost a refusal of death.
In "Una furtiva lagrima," the melody alone moves you, before the words, before the story. Something shifts in the chest before the mind has caught up. This is what I hope for, more than anything: that someone, somewhere, might feel a little bit of that. It would mean the journey had found its meaning.
