A Muntagna is a long-term project. Ten years of exploration, observation, hours and hours of walking along valleys and trails to capture the essence, the changes and the spirit of the highest and most active volcano in Europe: the Etna volcano; A Muntagna, in Sicilian dialect.
This is my photographic interpretation of a mysterious and fascinating territory. An interpretation through the use of symbology: The circle and square that best represent the characteristics of this corner of the earth.
The Circle, symbol of dynamism, infinite nature, of energy. The Square, symbol of earth, of the finite, expression of man within a space.
Description
I walked incessantly between the dark sand, like wrinkled skin of a tired body and black stone rivers similar to old wounds marking the hips of this mountain.
A journey through the volcano's abyss, similar to the entrance of hell. A look at the darkness of his bowels that contain the deeds of Demons and Giants. A peregrinate among its woods to capture the charm of ancient civilizations.
The Volcano Etna, whose immense beauty has been told for centuries and whose "essence"still fascinates humans, eager to know its twists and turns.
Hardly a day goes by that we, Genti of Etna, do not raise our eyes to the sky, conscious of the fact that here anything could happen abruptly.
Here, a balance can be broken in a blink of an eye and it only remains for us, powerless people, to witness the immeasurable strength of the One who overlooks such places: A Muntagna.
A place, unique of its kind, where you feel suspended halfway between sky and earth, as while you are admiring her power and secrets, amid lunar landscapes of the lava fields and its craters, you are able to observe the horizon of the sea.
A land where the strength of nature mixes its elements creating contrasting sceneries and where fantasy and psyche give life to surreal and shifty images, and unforgettable feelings.
Mount Etna has always been considered the eternal metaphor of the existent contradiction between the sense of movement and the immobility of the landscape, the place where the kingdom of life and the realm of death meet. The very symbol of the supernatural.
A Muntagna, always unforeseeable, is able to remain sleepy for a long time, and then abruptly erupt...immobility together with mutability.
A place which, though motionless, gives the feeling that something is smouldering under the ashes of the mountain and it is ready to blow up in all its expressions.
This twofold nature of life and death, of fertility and ruin, in the course of time, arose and still rises feelings of wonder and steps of countless famous and not so famous explorers. They, forgetting themselves and the risk, have concluded and still conclude their experience on the top of the Muntagna.
In this course of natural intimacy with my native land, emotions and imagines join in a play of symbols, the circle and the square that best express its essence.
These symbols hold several evocations, even hierarchically overlapping though they do not rule out one another, and since they mutually agreed, they complement and strengthen each other, integrating in the harmony of a total synthesis.
The Circle, symbol of celestial cycles, of the spiritual world, of dynamism, of the infinite nature of energy.
The Square, symbol of earth, of the finite, expression of man within a space. Together, the relation between heaven and earth, between perfect and imperfect, the ambition to a new stability.
Circle and square, the eternal along with the temporary, the two opposite poles that characterize the soul of our Muntagna.
