Beware, here there is no point of talking about photography. Let us pause for a moment. If there was no light this land would not exist. Here we are well over a situationist search for a Third Landscape as a form of re-appropriation of a relationship with a world lost in the attempt to master it. This project by Andrea Alessio cannot be read without taking account of the sunset that was already there which started much earlier than before. It represents the decline of the West and of the Judeo-Christian tradition embodied in it. In fact, if we pay attention, we’re not even at dusk. We are in a pitch dark without any signification, a lack of language, and the total disorientation of contemporary man.
And it is this light that shows us a practical understanding of the landscape, as a world to be used. It is made of useful things, thus becoming a Weralt or an age of man, twisting between guilt and redemption. Alessio cleverly uses the tools of the photographic technique to achieve a detachment from any form of theoretical marvel. He does not increase wonder but thought, he makes us think of the unthinkable (not yet thought), of what was kept metaphorically in the dark consciousness. And in this wandering in search of the light needed to rediscover the traces of what constitutes a sense of the landscape he manifests through photography, the primacy of poetry on reason. And in so doing the language includes man and not vice versa.
© Still images from book 'Before You Santa Claus, Life Was a Moonless Night by Andrea Alessio
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