Bellum
A new commissioned artistic project from Collezione Maramotti to Carlo Valsecchi
The forty-four large-scale photographs in this series – all of which can be seen in the book accompanying the exhibition, and about twenty of them in the show itself – tell the story of the ancestral conflict between man and nature and man and man; nature used as a defence from others, and nature as something to defend ourselves from. The Alps are a symbol of all this, as nature at its most extreme, yet also the site of the last war of position. The project therefore explores the territories and fortifications of northeast Italy connected to World War I, one of the last times when human fate and experience were directly linked to the laws, conditions and control of nature. What is left of that landscape from a century ago? What traces remain of the pact humanity had struck with nature at that point in history?
In three years of work, Valsecchi roamed these mountains with his view camera from winter until spring. Listening closely to what each place had to say, he peered into the abyss of a blind conflict and captured its harsh reality, in a form that is often abstract, intimately aesthetic, and absolute. The images in Bellum are sudden glimpses, portals of light and composition that hover in an endless time between loneliness, isolation and waiting.
In this series of photographs by Valsecchi, brimming with visual and conceptual analogies, nature sometimes becomes architectural or anthropomorphic, while the built environment merges with the natural one in a process of reciprocal exchange and imitation. Silently resonating within it are the cycles of nature and the flow of time – the slow mutation and erasure of humanity’s passage and of its inexorably ephemeral traces on the earth.
