Defrost

For many it is THE problem of our era: the increase in temperatures on our planet, regardless of its causes, has shocking effects: On July 2022, a piece of the Marmolada glacier in the Italian Alps broke away, overwhelming many people thirsty for its beauty. With my particular sensitivity, I had sensed the possibility of the event a month earlier and had begun in June 2022 a symbolic and poetic work on the thawing of the wildflowers that I had collected and frozen. Two years later, the disaster was deemed “unpredictable”, the red zone was revoked and the area is continuously monitored. But the Marmolada glacier, the largest in the Dolomites, is now a glacier in an irreversible coma. At this rate, by 2040, or even earlier, the Marmolada glacier will no longer exist, with many other glaciers in our World. Why I chose Wild Flowers as a project in the dry Italian spring of 2022? Their poignant beauty comes from their absolute unpredictability, resilience and at the same time delicate and ephemeral presence. They will probably be the last to die with the drought. Their beauty, preserved by freezing, disappears a few minutes after thawing, leaving room for wilted plants full of water and discolored. These considerations inspired me in June 2022 the project, which I titled Ice & Ikebanas, finalist the same year in two important photography contests: Tokyo International Foto Awards (TIFA), International Photography Awards/Lucie Foundation (IPA). The process of photographing frozen flowers during their rapid thawing constitutes a ritual, with an invitation to meditate on the paradoxical peculiarity of photography, well described by Roland Barthes in "La chambre claire", a freezing, a sort of eternal life which is also eternal death. The acronym "I & I", furthermore, refers to man's egocentrism, which creates and destroys.