The Weight of light
The Weight of Light project arose from my pressing need to shield myself from light, seen here as a metaphor for the high expectations I once placed on the land where I live (Salento, in southern Italy). Such expectations, often unmet, left me deeply disappointed, eventually driving me to leave my birthplace.
I ended up moving to London for a while, and upon my return, I felt the need to guard against another dazzling illusion. I wanted to reimagine the familiar places of my upbringing in a gentler, more peaceful light.
In order to create this new vision, it was crucial to manipulate the beam of light passing through the negatives in the darkroom. As a photographer, I had to take responsibility and make the choice to either soften and neutralise that blinding glare or to let it stay as an unsettling presence in the pictures.
The images shown here are part of a larger body of work, now collected in a self-published book titled The Weight of Light, printed in October 2024. The book opens with the following introduction:
“Cape Leuca, in southern Salento, is a borderland, a small strip of land distant from everything, even from itself. It’s a luminous place where the light reflects off bare stone only to be absorbed into the limestone blocks in the abandoned quarries.
Here, the illusion of standing in a place blessed by fate lasts only as long as it takes a sunbeam to shift and vanish, making way for shadows. What remains is darkness and the weight of finding oneself confined to a geographical boundary that can sometimes feel like a restriction for the soul.
The need to reconnect with the land I live in has led me on a quiet exploration of familiar, gentle places, aiming to find comfort on days when the light is blinding, and its absence can be felt more keenly.”
