© Pietro Motisi from the series "Fine"

Pietro Motisi's research is firmly anchored to the landscape, understood, however, not in its strictly anthropocentric definition, but as a whole in which interactions mix, collide, and resolve themselves in complexity, a system in which man is neither center nor neither purpose, a reversal of meaning that allows us to let go not only of the most widespread stereotyped visions of places but which operates an actual reversal of roles. Therefore, even if inhabited by man, places exist for themselves; they evolve and change even against us. If we exist in the landscape, the landscape does not exist for us. With such an awareness, the landscape acquires an unprecedented meaning and stops responding to our demands but instead brings out all those contradictions of our living, sometimes in a dramatic or at least worried way, as in the work "Fine," or with irony, in "IV SPAZIO," where we see a restored image of the city of Palermo that makes fun of all those stereotypes that usually describe it.

© Pietro Motisi from the series "Fine"

© Pietro Motisi from the series "Fine"

Pietro, I spent many days observing and studying your photographs and delving into the connections in your works, which communicate between them while maintaining a precise identity and independence in a broad speech. The landscape you give us is singular: although its relationship with humans is present yet reduced somehow. Humanity returns to being that small and fragile parenthesis that it is, in fact, on our planet. In this view, I find many affinities with some discourses that accompany environmental issues or those that, without minimizing their gravity, restore the right dimension to human intervention in the whole of planet Earth. Equally, I find an inevitable downsizing of human work too: Great History returns to being a simple past, and the remains of antiquity coexist and almost become invisible in the contemporary world, with no reverence, no pedestal. Not a nihilism, however, but perhaps a new form to concentrate between the present and the future, and, not surprisingly, I have found a recurring figure in your works, i.e., a person portrayed from behind who looks ahead, who goes forward, with uncertainty, sometimes with difficulty, but still cannot go back.

Pietro Motisi (PM): Firstly, I'd like to thank you for the time you have dedicated to my work, which to find translated into these introductory words profoundly moves me, simply because I feel them close and exact to what I could define as my 'intentions' in photographic practice. I also thank you for the opportunity you gave me to express some sensations outside the shots.As far as environmental issues are concerned, as well as many of the problems in general which unfortunately are central today in seeing human beings divided from one another, from the 'rest of the world' and the rest of nature, I believe that unfortunately things are always guided essentially by interests of a few, over which the vast majority of the inhabitants of the planet can't do much. What we have around us is that handful of square meters within which we organize our life; basically, what we do with it is often more important than imagined. Starting precisely from not giving yourself too much importance, from not placing yourself at the center of everything but 'feeling' and feeling part of everything, whether small or large and with your sensitivity. Educating (including oneself) not to be afraid to show one's delicacy; one's sensitivity to things is a necessary and fundamental first step to begin to resonate in harmony with one's surroundings, whatever living being composes it.

© Pietro Motisi from the series "Cemento"

There is no going back, and awareness can only be a tool for the present, in the here and now, and for the sense of responsibility that we can develop and suggest by sharing specific ideas, such as that of a horizontal belonging and without classifications with everything that makes up the world. The past few decades have seen us increasingly closed in the emulation of reality inside illusory bubbles, which are an almost exclusive receptacle of frustrations and ailments since, in my opinion, they preclude direct relationships with reality. This phenomenon seems inexorable, and we communicate worse and worse; our vocabularies shrink as our chance to get our hands dirty and love each other deeply.

© Pietro Motisi from the series "Cemento"

Still, on this theme, another question: what space does memory have in your poetics? What is the relationship between personal memory and the shared one that sometimes becomes history?

PM: The binomial memory/history more or less always has to do with power dynamics or, in the words of Andrea Staid, with 'hierarchy and domination.' And this regards the collective memory and all those elements that are kept on the surface despite what inevitably falls into oblivion or in the memories of frustrated minorities.
The dynamics of personal memory constitute horizons/thresholds from which to be crossed like a fishing net, letting them go into the energy flow of everything and retaining what our inner meshes, in the sincere measure of our feelings, can leave us inside.
Photographing is fundamentally the fixing of a representation of reality, therefore becoming a space of potential memory. The beauty lies in the fact that my fixed memory, once shared, leaves room for the memory of others in a democratic and available tableaux. My photographed places are habitable by everyone, and everyone can put their experience and emotions into them without needing to go through mine. I don't offer perfect 'neutrality' in this sense, but rather a willingness to find an instant of poetry and peace in the ordinary.
We have been living in a time of uncertainty and collapse for several years now, and if twenty years ago yelling at destruction and paying attention was not helpful, today we can only count on our ability to imagine, shoring up what we feel strong inside like our identity, who is injured today.

© Pietro Motisi from the series "Sicilia Fantasma"

© Pietro Motisi from the series "Sicilia Fantasma"

In many places, such as our latitude, the didactic signs of the conflict are missing. Here as in many other places, there is no shooting or bombing, but it is in progress and acts on our energies and minds. The interstices of the usual (according to my rational opinion moving from a feeling that leads me to frame and fix certain pieces of reality rather than others) remain those apparently unimportant places in which, however, our identity and our soul takes root, living or at least trying to find vitality in a harmonious and analogical way. For this reason, I most likely feel the need not to forget and not to make them fail.

© Pietro Motisi from the series "Sicilia Fantasma"

It's important to talk about the act of 'recognizing' something that I therefore photographed. We are imbued with cultural conditioning from which it is impossible to cleanse ourselves. Therefore many aspects related to the choice of 'what to take' are the effect of this conditioning. But there is something strong and ineffable that physically stops me, a 'click' before the click, very often even precisely at the exact point from which I will shoot. It is a sudden awareness of having found something I had lost, which I recognize when I have it before me. Here, in this perhaps strange explanation, is my relationship with memory and the impossibility of attributing any power to it, as it is experienced almost as an ecstasy and a moment of fusion with time and space.

Your friendship with the writer Matteo Meschiari is also a collaboration and a harmony of visions. Let's start from the concept of IV Spazio: it is inevitable to think of Gilles Clément's Third Landscape...

PM: More than a collaboration, today I see this intersection as if it were a geological process, in which extreme pressures and temperatures compress and shape materials which, from their origin, end up suggesting new images and forms, also offering a different appearance to the present space. The fundamental difference between the two writings is that Clément makes an arid, schematic work, which offers (at least as far as I'm concerned) little space for the stimulation of the imaginary. Meschiari's text, despite being scientific/anthropological, never fails to show possibilities and 'failures' that function as breaches in the mind in search of resolution and light. In the case of IV Spazio Palermo, I think I have only done a didactic operation linked to the imaginative opportunities of Meschiari's writing and to my growing sense of responsibility towards the places where I was born.

© Pietro Motisi from the series "IV Spazio (Palermo)"

It might sound arrogant, but I do not intend to compare myself to his genius. The ecstasy of Bernini's Saint Teresa comes to mind. Ignoring the totality of the work which is inscribed in a real theater (although here there would be precisely the concept of 'framing'), focusing on the execution of the figure of the mystic, one realizes how much the work adheres in a didactic measure to the same descriptions of the Saint of her ecstasies, above all when she resorts to the example of the sensation of drowning. Bernini, who knows these writings well, lets the material sensation of drowning become the perfect representation of abandonment and ecstasy, which the subject cannot enjoy but is crossed as a whole divine.

Returning to the fourth space, we might recall the concept of 'threshold,' training the eyes not to get used to or to lose the ability to make things disappear 'outside the projects of daily life.' Things/places/details that can sometimes contemplate critical and pregnant points of reflection for alive and present research are linked to the action regarding our spaces today, passing through lively sensations that cross us intimately. "Everything passes and everything leaves a trace."

Again with Matteo Meschiari, you crossed his Apennines, which you define as "a fundamental elsewhere"...

This relationship with the Apennines and, in particular, with those areas of the Modena Apennines that I have had the opportunity to walk and feel has close links with that mechanism of poetic research that I would define as circular or reciprocal. A mechanism that develops in the relationship with what surrounds me, in the interstices of daily reality, and in favor of all those 'usual' places that vibrate with an energetic significance that is difficult to ignore and which operates a strong elective appeal, essential for making you flourish further reflection steps.
In this sense, the Apennines stand as an icon, a karstic sinkhole of existence which, despite everything and us, continues to inexorably preserve all organic and inorganic history, starting from without us. Vibrating without the desire to vibrate.
Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, in his show on 13 December 2017 at the church of San Pietro in Reggio Emilia, dedicates a moment to it which he entitles precisely 'my Apennines,' which I report below. I don't believe in accompanying captions to 'hold up the photographs, as I expressed to writer and photographer friend Roberto Boccaccino concerning the text to the series "Sicilia Fantasma." But if I had to choose a text that accompanies each photograph (and given the cultural distinctions related to matters of faith), it would be this:

«The ancient body of civilization crumbles, of Western Christianity, weaned between monasteries and hermitages, villages and castles, and which it has been handed down by ruminating what remained of the antecedent. That future, our past, has been basted, in a horizon redeemed by incarnation, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension, awaiting your coming. Once incumbent a time, then imminent, then diluted, then count was lost. Citizen has become synonymous with free man, custodian of inalienable rights, reaching out to a disembodied and standardized realization: producer, consumer, user, in a technological space where connection reduces time to a perennial succession of immediacy, uprooted from any historical and geographical context to itself. My Apennine allows the perception of a civilization's material and spiritual collapse but lets you sharpen your gaze on what has preceded us, not in vain. I want to be only here, in this uncertain hour. An economically bankrupt, politically insignificant, socially losing context. Yet here, life shines in its essence; life shines in its mystery.»

Collaborations, suggestions, and your works resound with correspondences and openings, an approach which, in addition to being profitable, demonstrates how solitary paths, those in which the photographer is self-sufficient, are not the only ones possible but that a lot can be built and more by sharing experiences. 

PM: My practice moves only within the culmination of an expressive need, whether personal or induced, and internalized as a result. Carmelo Bene used to say that literature cannot be made with literature, painting with painting, theater with theatre and that it is necessary to deal with life. In the case of photography, the imagination must be stimulated. Visions must be procured through stimuli that are not inherent in photography itself, but from the relationship with life, with affections, with hates, literature, cinema, strangers, mistakes, and what remains in our emotional network until it is digested and polarized within the action, if and when it's time. The photographic 'click' lasts only a fraction of a second but condenses a whole series of ingredients of which it would be impossible to have perfect knowledge, let alone control. Given the technique and the language, what matters is only flow. There is a fundamental difference between wanting something and truly wanting something. In the second case, as a fatalist, I always notice that life arranges itself so that what must be possible is possible. It is always an epiphany of emotions and perfect joints when this happens. And the results are at least sincere, heartfelt, and loved. 

© Pietro Motisi from the series "Lodi, Ora Media"

© Pietro Motisi from the series "Lodi, Ora Media"

© Pietro Motisi from the series "Lodi, Ora Media"

A beautiful and recent example concerns the work carried out in Lodi last September. Francesco Gesti, from the Mittel bookshop in Lodi, asked me to bring my "eye" from the previous work done in the pandemic on the apocalypse theme (series "Fine") to his city. Once on site, given the limited time available, he drove me through the spaces and energies significant to him for four days, allowing me to develop a sensitivity 'in the wake' of his relationship with what he wanted me to represent. He had no idea how everything would turn into photographs behind my eye, but it turned out very well. All of this showed me how sympathy, in the etymological sense of the term, can be essential and, as in this case, a crucial element in the result of a job.

© Pietro Motisi from the series "Lodi, Ora Media"

Earlier, I mentioned the irony that I see in the IV SPAZIO work: it made me smile to see how you revisited all the narratives that accompany Palermo, but Southern Italy in general and, perhaps, all those minor, peripheral areas, the black and white, the backwardness, the children on the street, you have put on an accurate representation.

Thirteen years after that work, I am better aware of that process and execution in which even the error played its role in emphasizing an intention that solidified as I photographed. The weird photographs with those hazes were a developer error on a batch of film. It took me a while to make peace with it and notice how the shroud, the damage that rested on those shots, still allowed us to read their contents by adding something dirty and unexpected. So I decided to keep those shots. I shot a lot more than what I show, which is why some of my friends always complain about all my work, that for them I am too severe in my editing, and that among the outtakes, there is always at least one other complete work. For me, this is part of the representation mechanism. Anyone who has followed the theater not only as a spectator knows well that the show, the 'première,' is nothing but a tiny portion compared to the whole journey and the processes that have led up there. Not to mention every actor's life that is no longer the same as before. I don't know how much my representation is worth in a scenario concerning Sicily. I know that it represents a threshold that I have crossed, that I am happy to have lived as a witness, choosing to measure myself with an essential technique before abandoning it to dedicate myself to the limits of color.

© Pietro Motisi from the series "IV Spazio (Palermo)"

What about your educational path?

PM: I studied classical guitar for five years at the Palermo Conservatory and then dropped out at 17. In 2002, moved by my curiosity for photography more from a technical point of view and attracted by the romanticism of the darkroom, I bought a Russian reflex. So I started taking my first awful photographs to get the negatives to develop and to be able to print those rare decent photographs. There was no wishful thinking and much frustration, but I slowly gained technical experience in managing the process from start to finish. In 2004 I photographed the rehearsals of a theatrical show of a company that would become like a family for several years, Teatro Terzo Uomo, made up of artists that I still love deeply: Dario Enea, Massimiliano Carollo, and Gianluca Gangemi. At that time, together with other guys, I was managing the 'fourth wall,' a cultural space in Palermo where we hosted various events, including the show of the company mentioned above. On the night of the dress rehearsal, to the astonishment of those present, I said I had finished the roll of film and that I would be away for the time to develop it, shutting myself up in the darkroom installed in one of the bathrooms. That night I had my first personal exhibition, consisting of a dozen still-wet prints hung out to dry and an audience of artists sincerely surprised by the result. The emotion of those present was an encouragement that led me that same summer to win a still photography award with some of those shots.

© Pietro Motisi. Dario Enea in "Nosferatu", 2004 

From that moment, I began to be interested in theater and to photograph it more and more, meeting realities on various scales at the national and international level, collaborating with some magazines and receiving a special mention in 2006 and winning the 2008 edition of 'Occhi di Scena', the only national photographic award dedicated to still photography managed by Massimo Agus and Andrea Mancini, with the Titivillus publishing house of San Miniato in Pisa. Meanwhile, in Palermo, I became a friend and assistant of the photographer Giacomo D'Aguanno, working with him in the commercial field in the studio and making things like the catalog of the Palermo Gam, which opened in 2007 and other works in the field of reproductions of works of art. Thanks to him, I could work again in the darkroom, use prestigious equipment and meet photographer friends who frequented the studio, such as Alfredo D'Amato, Mauro D'Agati, Tony Gentile, and Letizia Battaglia. Slowly stage photography was getting closer to me, and I began capturing real-life scenes. I began to follow some realities of migrants in Palermo, and their relationship with religion, which became articles in local newspapers, but I was not happy with my results. Alfredo D'Amato advised me to apply for admission to the Documentary Photography course at the UWN in Newport, which at the time took only forty students a year. So I packed a small portfolio and went to Newport for the interview. Ken Grant, Paul Reas, and Clive Landen, the course leaders, were all three there and told me that, given where I came from, it was unfair to keep me waiting for an answer. I still remember that today as one of the best moments of my life. Completing that academic path represented a profound personal turning point and the beginning of my practice as an author.

© Pietro Motisi. Franco Saldati in "La Gatta di Pezza". Teatro Garibaldi, 2006 

Pietro Motisi (website)