The mermaids inside
by Sebastiano Raimondo
portfolio shortlisted call 'SACRED. THE EXPERIENCE OF BEYOND', 2019
This sequence is part of a project dedicated to the city of Naples. It is a small selection of images of my experience as lived in the city, a sequence whose genesis is connected to encounters, readings, studies and imaginary stories upon which I mirrored myself following coincidences with my interests and real life. It all started with an invitation from a Neapolitan friend to propose again, after thirty years, a project conceived and commissioned by Cesare de Seta between the years of 1981 to 1985, a new image of the city with different objectives and personal ways of reading by each invited author.
I lived in the city for about two years, from 2014 to 2015, very frequently traveling by ships departed from Sicily, my homeland. These trips passed through places whose toponymy coincided with the places of the Homeric encounter of Ulysses and the mermaids. As time went by, my image of the city took the form of a winged mermaid’s body. Traces that still exist, objects and contemporary images made me understand that the cult of the mermaid Parthenope still resists to this day in literature, in theatre, in young people’s rites and places of Christian worship.
The photographs collect fragments of this undefinable frontier between real and imaginary; they may be necessary traces for other encounters between travelers and mermaids. These are my corresponding images to the symbolic meaning of that Homeric encounter. When we are certain to be on reality’s side, as the photographic mean suggests, someone inside us whispers that what we are seeing is a reflected image, an apparent window from where we observe the world, but also where, if looking carefully, we find our own contained image. The mermaids are not, therefore, in the images, but in the silence of the photographs. The encounter with these mythical women, since the time of Ulysses, may show us the journey we went through and the roads amongst which we must choose to carry on.
Today, I live in another country, one that I frequented before living in Naples, but only after this experience, I may comprehend how to continue the project in this new city, Lisbon, whose name in the Roman age was dedicated to Ulysses.
I lived in the city for about two years, from 2014 to 2015, very frequently traveling by ships departed from Sicily, my homeland. These trips passed through places whose toponymy coincided with the places of the Homeric encounter of Ulysses and the mermaids. As time went by, my image of the city took the form of a winged mermaid’s body. Traces that still exist, objects and contemporary images made me understand that the cult of the mermaid Parthenope still resists to this day in literature, in theatre, in young people’s rites and places of Christian worship.
The photographs collect fragments of this undefinable frontier between real and imaginary; they may be necessary traces for other encounters between travelers and mermaids. These are my corresponding images to the symbolic meaning of that Homeric encounter. When we are certain to be on reality’s side, as the photographic mean suggests, someone inside us whispers that what we are seeing is a reflected image, an apparent window from where we observe the world, but also where, if looking carefully, we find our own contained image. The mermaids are not, therefore, in the images, but in the silence of the photographs. The encounter with these mythical women, since the time of Ulysses, may show us the journey we went through and the roads amongst which we must choose to carry on.
Today, I live in another country, one that I frequented before living in Naples, but only after this experience, I may comprehend how to continue the project in this new city, Lisbon, whose name in the Roman age was dedicated to Ulysses.