無常の響き/Echoes of Impermanence

"The sound of the Gion Shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things... The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night..." Opening lines of "The Tale of the Heike", translated by Helen Craig McCullough One of the cornerstones of Japanese aesthetics is the concept of "無常/Mujo" which originates in Buddhism and refers to the impermanence and transmutability of beings, things and phenomena in the world. From this concept derives the "物の哀れ/Mono no Aware" which defines the ability to not only accept the impermanence of things, but to appreciate that ephemerality. In this way the brevity of things becomes a condition for them to provoke an aesthetic experience: those are beautiful insofar as they are ephemeral. Thus, the physical subject yields its preeminence to its temporal transience. This ongoing project, which began to take shape in early 2022 but extends to the beginnings of my photographic practice, is an exploration of the spatio-temporal aspect of the photographed subjects. However, I would also like to think that they speak of time beyond time, as each of them reflects the imagination that marked the path to the image, the rhizomes of memory and the expectation of the future, the search to enunciate personal and community myths, my emotional and intellectual flow, the multidimensionality and, as a sum, photography as a language that transcends time. Everything that happened before and what will happen after the photographic capture is a discourse in search of binding with other discourses to become a melting pot of possibilities of meaning: the vital network in which we are inscribed as humans and whose transformations escape my, already ephemeral, initial purpose. Thus, I consider that the images that make up this collection are like a dissonant mantra that repeats itself: the same photograph taken in different ways, like the sound of a bell that echoes the impermanence of things.