A Micro Odyssey

Raising his or her eyes to heaven, who doesn’t ask himself or herself what place and what role it’s for the earth and the man who lives on it, in the infinite space expansion, of which we do not know the boundaries? Ancestral is the fear of the universe, but much stronger is its charm. Man has always dreamed of being able to conquer the sky, and the space then. Photography, the same way, is the desire to make, to capture and to modify a personal reality. But what do you feel knowing that planets protagonists of these photographs are nothing more than the image of bacterial colonies that populate every corner of our planet, every surface and living creature? The trinomial photography, planets and bacteria and the binomial heaven and earth, finite and infinite, known and unknown, give shape to the emotions and reflections that these works want to convey and inspire. Opposites vie for our moods and our feelings: dark and light, fantasy and reality, truth and abstraction. The planets - their names pay homage to objects, places and living things that carry these microorganisms on them, as ferrymen and unaware "spreaders" - are only the visible image of an almost invisible world, frequently associated with its negativity, its power to kill, destroy, sick, but which instead establishes any possibility of life on the planet. These images subvert all logic: micro becomes macro and vice versa, the small features and form the large and the large leads the small in a vast and infinite space, the visible and the invisible reality are confused, as the light becomes author and accomplice our perception, our vision and our hearing. These works, then, in addition to being the dreamlike picture of imaginative planets, contain many meanings and inspirations in their harmonic and ethereal beauty, enclose the fascination and fear of man's destiny and the Earth, the unknown, the science and its limits; incorporate the thirst for knowledge, the adrenaline and excitement of research and discovery; are, in short, the projection of the fears, anxieties, but also of fantasies, dreams and hopes of all of us. (Caterina Pacenti, curator - 2016)