Landscapes have a language of their own, and the lens allows us to capture their voice. Images are like echoes of that voice, narratives that fade in time. Through the lens we can create visions of the world built on multiple layers of observation and reflection: there, the past and the present merge, delineating our cultural landscape’s profile.

 

With MATERIA ET LOCIS, Vicenza-born photographer and filmmaker Denis Guzzo resumed the work he initiated in the last decade: a documentary exploration of contemporary European landscapes. Years of dedication and repeated journeys have allowed the author to reveal the visible and the invisible of the places, the real and the metaphorical that will be presented within the exhibition.

 

It was thanks to the city of Palladio and to its numerous exhibitions of architectural masters that the author was able to grasp in depth the concept of Genius Loci, the Spirit of the Place; and  develop his own research method based on interaction between photography and careful cartographic and archival research.

 

In the first two rooms, monumental prints captured on large format negative introduce us to the two mile-stone projects of his work: WAISTING MYTOLOGY and FREEDOMLAND, executed in parallel, between 2010 and 2016 in both Greece and the Netherlands.

Analyzing the meanings and the traces that human beings attribute to places, starting from a reading of the landscape in a mythological key, Guzzo builds an extended, layered and  organic visual mapping.

 

WASTING MYTHOLOGY lead us to Eleusis, an ancient Greek town, where one of Europe's oldest archaeological sites has been suffocated and devoured by the destructive impact of new industries. A wound in the physical and mythological landscape; where the sacred hill dedicated to the goddess Demeter was devoured by the local cement industry.

On the one hand, therefore, the contemporary ‘Real’ marked by the violence of the industrial impact, on the other, the ‘Fragile’ of the natural elements preserved in the archaeological memory: it is here that the his photographs exist as a kind of ‘borderline’.

 

FREEDOMLAND takes us to the Dutch province of Flevoland, a vast area "emerged from the sea" due to a huge reclamation intervention, which took place between the 1950s and 1960s. "Flevo" is the name that the Romans gave to the lagoon that today houses entire cities and where the knowledge and pioneering spirit of the Dutch has been materialized. The research here investigates the morphology of this unique man-made land; where new concepts of landscapes and urban planning assume though the lens almost a transcendental connotation.

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