NATURAE

The Day After

I undertook a "free waking dream" therapy from 2009 to 2011. In all, I had 50 dreams in which my mental images carried me into infinite spaces, dreamlike landscapes. The "free waking dream" reveals such and such a hidden part and leads to a clearer representation of certain stages of psychological development towards a unity that integrates complexity.

Six years after the end of these sessions, I wanted to create an artistic project based on this experience and my readings of Jung. He insisted on the common character of dream symbols, resulting from a shared culture. For him, there is a personal unconscious, the result of the subject's history, and an impersonal or collective unconscious, which carries the archetypes. This idea of a collective unconscious, he developed it with the help of Wolgang Pauli, one of the actors who contributed to the birth of modern physics. Through their correspondence, we see in the two researchers the idea that the psyche is neither psychic nor physical, but at the same time divinity.

With the archives of my 50 dreams written by my therapist, I both retraced my waking dreams and wanted to bring out the collective part of them that Jung was talking about, with its symbols of shapes and colours. At the end of this work, I noticed that my photographs had their own psychological temporality. Each photograph taken has as its title the symbolism of the dream on which the therapist stopped.  

It is a mental device, a journey that makes visible the different stages of psychological "trans-form-actions" of these two years. If the flow of images released in "the free waking dream" is really a language and, perhaps, as E. Fromm, the only universal language, suggested, this therapy has brought me the individuation process described by Carl Gustav Jung: Finding the original unity, the return to the totality, the Self, lived in a now conscious way.

Inner Vision

This project examines the contradictory roles of nature in satisfying our desire for beauty and control while realizing our fear of uncertainty through chaos. The work provides an unfettered view of nature that equalizes the spiritual with the mundane and the natural with the urban in order to reassess our definition of the sublime. This internal view reflects a time of spiritual reckoning; a time where our biological evolution as a species is in constant threat of being outdated. I want to bring forth the same mix of psychological terror, enthusiasm, and dreamlike wonder that we feel when coping with natures rapid change.

Humans are strictly bonds with nature.  After all we couldn't live without all the complexity that surround us.  Now, more than ever we need to find our own individuality, and our questions searches for earthly answers. Sea knows it all.

La Favorita

La Favorita is a 400 hectares managed as Natural Reserve under Monte Pellegrino; inside there are: Palazzina Cinese, the Ethnographic Museum G. Pitre, Villa Niscemi, Race course, Roma camp, football stadium, municipality warehouses, World War II derelict military check points and other sports facilities. It was born as a hunting reserve for the aristocracy in the 17th century and for agricultural experiments with large crops of citrus, olive, ash, walnut and sumac...  A large part today is a semi-abandoned park, a joggers' and bikers' playground, a hares' kingdom, a picnic- nickers refuge & a prostitutes' working place.  These images are collected notes of a candid botanist in the largest green area of Palermo. All punctuate the melancholic geography of my wanderings and migrations and like Pollicino they all trail my way back to an impossible return home.  La Favorita is also a microcosm where Sicily and the Mediterranean are conveyed as a metaphor of the attachment of Sicilians to their territory but in the same time as their impulse to migrate and carry for luggage ruins and roots.