"Nothing is created and nothing is destroyed. Everything is transformed". And yet, destruction seems the only thing left when facing the devastating spectacle that takes place every year in Sicily, when summer fires disfigure a defenceless landscape. The photographic series by artist Alessandro Di Giugno is an unprecedented act of condemnation of this seasonal abuse. It builds a visual path portraying trees, plants and the whole burnt vegetation through images which appear still green and yet are not alive. The nature on display is enwrapped in a 0.255.0 green filter which transfigures the landscape and defines two phases: first the illusion - hypocrisy even - that everything is in fact "green", and therefore "alright". And yet, deep down, it only amplifies nature's rigenerative skills, anticipating them, because everything that was devastation becomes instead infused with a positive meaning. A meaning that fits Sicily itself, a land that's almost always been able to reborn from its ashes. The work proposed by Alessandro Di Giugno revolves then around the mission of photography itself, with its own meaning and distorted modes of representing reality. In Magenta, all of this fuses together the "destruens and costruens" components, the condemnation and the research.
Montagna longa [video, 2018]
On August the 3rd 2017, a vast area in the territory of "Montagna Longa" - in Carini (PA) - goes up in flames. Part of the top of the mountain remains intact and this brings the artist to a resolve: he will film his walk in subjective to record both realities, with the camera pointing down and using the 0.255.0 filter. The screen, cut in two, shows two scenes at the time time: the devastation overlaps the nature that's still intact.The result is a fusion between the two parts, perfectly balanced and scanned by the rhythmic soundtrack - recorded by an American Navy band - with the purpose once again to normalise the tragedy and to water it down in an indistinctive green hypocrisy.