Chapter 4

The New Jerusalem

“...The not entirely extinguished appeal of photography consists in the promise it flashes of a possible encounter with the real, where seeing becomes vision.”

— Vaccari

I was in Jerusalem in December 2013, I was visiting many holy places, but honestly I never felt so disconnected to the “transcendent” in my life as I did in these places. I returned to my apartment one evening and decided that I was going to stay in from that moment on, just think and work with objects that I had taken previously from the city – stones, fruit, soil and even the head of a lamb that the butcher gave me at the old market – and make still lives. At that time, I had never seen anybody dead, physical death was scary and I wanted to investigate it through this dead lamb. Or maybe, even truer, I wanted to experience and express mourning in a way that I never allowed myself. I shut myself in for several days, following the decomposition of the lamb, accompanying it on its journey. Later I did something similar with a shark in Palestine. I only realised later when somebody in New York City told me – but I’d been making a kind of altar. 

I asked the people I met to tell me again the stories of the Bible (and the Torah, and the Quran, and the Apocalypse). The Holy Texts are not psychological, I mean they do not explain what people thought or how they felt. It’s a complex narration of events and actions that each reader can shape according to their own mind. I understood that when Nello was talking about Adam, he was actually talking about himself, that Samara was Judah and many other people inhabited the Holy Texts for me. The portraits in this gallery are the consequences of following this process.

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The bride of the sea

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Abraham's Holocaust