Antarctica

Traveling always had a leading role in my life. A sort of anxiety always pushed me to change places, city, country. I was unable to move to a certain place and spend my life there. My scientific activity gave me the opportunity to travel in several almost inaccessible places, and the most remote one is surely Antarctica.

What interested me in this series of pictures was, through the landscape photo, to reflect some special feelings experienced in Antarctica. A part from the cold, outer space, vastness, loneliness, etc. the strongest feeling for me was a return to a state of pure and primitive existence, the feeling that the whole superstructure of the civilization, culture, social relations are finally meaningless, and eliminate a direct contact with things and existence.

On an icebreaker in navigation in the southern seas of the world, the perception of things is turned upside down, everything to which we are accustomed, that we believe in, reality and fantasy are reinvented. Antarctica is the most inhospitable place in the world, the weather is almost that of another planet, survival without the help of technology is virtually impossible. Yet in this hostile world suddenly you feel at home, one gets the impression of arriving in the place that he has always searched for in a lifetime.

And that is what tells us the brilliant blue of the iceberg, the sea under the black sky full of clouds, the incessant wind which stirs a tear from a corner of your eyes, the cliffs of volcanic rock that emerge from the water with violence, the reflecting white of a boundless glacier. The great white continent explains what life could be without us, the land before it knew man.
The landscapes become almost metaphysical visions, suggesting a return to a primordial and pure life before civilization was born, before the social superstructure leaves its imprint on living beings.

I have therefore sought to reduce the landscape to its essence, pure and simple forms at the limit of abstraction. As if the landscape was reflected only by a graphic sign, a metaphysical message from nature.

I’m not interested in reality as it is. I’m searching to reveal the hidden message of Antarctica.