Every single stone
There is a place where shadows have not made room for the sun, a place where you can walk for a long time and not see anyone, because it seems that no one lives there. You can count thousand and thousand of times every single stone in the alleyway that has no end. You can peer through the small windows that will show you your loneliness every time. It is a place full of muffled silence, which leaves room only for the scents of damp earth and ancient walls. In the intimacy of this suspended dimension you can only rarely manage to listen to your heartbeat and find yourself naked. In Erice, where the virus has never arrived. Erice who dreams of starting again from its scents of woods and sweets made by precious hands, Erice who waits for new voices, steps lost in the alleys, summer laughter.
I’m a Sicilian photographer. After classical studies I dedicated myself to amateur photography. Giving visual concreteness to my imagination and perceptions was not a desire, but rather a necessity. I started to look inside myself through a lens, and I found the fragments with which my being, my life, my culture had been built: I found my land and my people, every place I visited, all the books I read. Fragile tesserae, one intertwined with the other in a subtle embroidery, which turned out to be part of me and whose physicality, sometimes raw and bitter, revealed itself in beauty and emotion. Looking through one’s own shots is a difficult path, sometimes joyful, more often full of sad reflections: an impervious path of which I never see the epilogue. It is seeing where others cannot see. – Patrizia Galia
