There is something unsettling about looking at the earth from above. From the aerial’s detached, almost disembodied perspective, the landscape reveals itself as a skin: a surface inscribed with traces, scars and ruptures, where the apparent continuity of the territory is constantly interrupted by the marks of human intervention. In Francesco Sammarco’s "Aporias of Transition", the construction corridor of the Naples–Bari High-Speed Rail line becomes a landscape in the process of being rewritten, its familiar contours opened up by trenches, fences, excavations and provisional roads. The infrastructure project appears less as a promise of connection than as an incision in the living body of the land.

Moving between ground-level proximity and aerial reconnaissance, Sammarco constructs a double vision. From below, the construction site is encountered through its material presence, its obstructions and its immediate impact on the surrounding environment. From above, it becomes a larger territorial diagram, a network of cuts and displacements that exposes the asymmetries hidden within the rhetoric of progress. The land becomes both image and evidence, its surface bearing witness to transformations whose consequences extend beyond the visible boundaries of the construction site.

These are landscapes suspended between what has been and what is yet to come. Their temporariness is not simply a matter of unfinished works or provisional arrangements, but a condition in which the present is repeatedly sacrificed to an anticipated future. The wounds remain visible even as they are framed as necessary steps towards development. And what happens when such wounds become ordinary? When excavated earth, severed paths and fragmented horizons cease to provoke a response? Sammarco’s images raise an uncomfortable question: can the repeated exposure to environmental disruption produce a form of collective trauma, one that takes shape through the slow normalisation of damage? Perhaps the most troubling aspect of these landscapes is not their visible devastation, but the possibility that we may eventually learn to look at them without truly seeing them.