Mario e il Mare
There is a spot on the coast of Avola Marina where the light seems to never end. There, everything holds its breath: the houses, the sand, the water that comes and goes like an ancient thought. The sea, constantly moving but never truly different, acts as a metaphor for the cycle of life. It is the sea that Mario gazed upon every day, not as someone searching, but as someone who belongs to that sea that seems to hold his presence in its perpetual motion.
The series, which takes shape in the everyday places where Mario, a young father and husband, spent his days before his death at the age of 42 from cancer, becomes the starting point for a visual reflection on permanence and absence, on time that continues to flow despite loss. These photos, taken in August and February, depict spaces outlined by summer light and then winter darkness, becoming the filter through which I try to convey an experience of hope, separation and memory. The images focus on the landscape as a silent witness to a personal event, yet universal in its emotional depth.
The walls, the rust, the reflections on the sand become the language of a silent farewell. Marked by the time of illness and then by the time of the end, the project traverses the material of the visible as in a slow and ancient ritual. Photographing these places was a way of restoring what remains when presence dissolves: Mario e il Mare is not a story of death, but of permanence. Mario is not there, but each image is a form of his absence and his memory: a receding horizon, empty cabins, a closed house, a sea that does not forget and continues to breathe, even when everything else stops. The choice to document these intimate, everyday places serves not only to tell a personal story, but also to reflect on photography as an attempt to hold on to what flows away and to transform grief into an act of poetic resistance.
