“Presente Infinito”(2015/22) is a long term project which will be published by the Italian publisher Rubbettino next March. The historian Augusto Placanica describes the peculiar relationship between man and the environment in Calabria using the figure of the "inner landscape", defined as "a meeting point between two territories, that of the soil of Calabria and that of the soul of the Calabrian - a place where the history of the territory and the landscape, of architecture and culture, of life and soul, merge”. Without a doubt, this definition brings the traditional definition of "landscape" to mind, in the sense of a set of intelligible signs, traces of man on the land which, as part of a discourse, tell us about the set of relationships that form the relationship between man and nature. However, the peculiar events that have marked the evolution of Calabrian communities, trapped in a very long period of absolute isolation - from the end of the Magna Graecia civilisation to contemporary times - which has led to a crystallisation of socio-economic and socio-cultural structures, allow us to imagine that the normal link between man and the environment has deepened to the point of generating a fusion or identification between the human element and the natural one. In order to move within this "landscape", one must first of all free oneself from any spatial and temporal coordinates, in order to try to grasp the symbolic essence of the relationship between man and nature.
It is no coincidence that the archetypal element of this landscape is stone, the bare rock, which over the centuries has given shelter to monks and hermits who, fleeing from anti- Christian persecution, left the things of this world behind and abandoned themselves to an ancestral relationship of fusion with the natural element. The identity of this landscape is rooted in trauma and crisis, since over the centuries earthquakes, landslides and floods have continually marked the relationship between man and the environment, conditioning the evolution of communities to the point of encouraging the emergence of a disillusioned view of life among the populations concerned. The Calabrian landscape must be accordingly framed in its fragility and precariousness. Therefore, in the perspective of a fusion of human and natural elements, the constitutional weakness of the land is matched by the weakness of the economy, settlements and building structures. This vision reminds us of a world caught in the grip of natural constraints, forced into the limited horizon of the present.