Vito Finocchiaro

Every year the earth around our Muntagna burns with a very heavy damage balance. The Etna Park is defaced by fires. A sad reality that is most often caused by man. Fires set in the hottest and windy days in the midst of the scrubland spread flames everywhere and leave a harrowing desolation. Hundreds of hectares of brooms, oak trees and ancient chestnut trees are swallowed by the fire. When a plant burns it opens a wound on the earth and reveals its heart. The silence of the place is annihilated by the dark crackling of the fire that launches into the air a myriad of sparks and spreads around a shower of flaming embers. Like a slimy snake, the fire crawls and tangles, stripping the rough rocks and tearing the bark of the trees that slowly die as agonizing bodies. With my images I wanted to document the havoc of what is a symbol of our Volcano: the Ginestra. A plant in its almost insignificant structure, but which for the Celtic people was the symbol of the sun and for us it is the essence of Sicily, of the Mediterranean, with its flowers that color and perfume the immense black expanses of our lavas. I wanted to photograph the black and still smoking "bodies" of the Broom burned by the fires, I wanted to capture the essence, the agony, the pain, but at the same time, I wanted to make them reborn giving them new forms. I have changed their fate making them reborn through lines, shapes and spaces. I have transformed them into abstract figures, whose plots go beyond an objective representation of real life and stimulate everyone's imagination in the development of subjective content.