The Mountain
by Claire Power
portfolio special mention call 'URBANAUTICA INSTITUTE AWARDS 2021', 2021
Category: Anthropology and Territories
La Montagna is an enchanted place where human beings are confronted with the mystery of their own existence: being inside and outside of nature.
There is no place where the illusion of human omnipotence is so fragile as at the feet of Vesuvius: the potential for catastrophe always underlying the life of its inhabitants. They domesticate it calling it "the mountain".
The project follows the traces of an ancient rural history transmitted through christo-pagan rituals, blood and gestures, in the relationship between beings and earth. It manifests through an almost tactile experience which reminds us of the body as inevitably linked and wholly immersed in the material world. The images evoke magical elements incorporating superstitions, mythology, and imaginary rituals of communion and divorce, playing with the editing to blur the distinction between the material and symbolic, the human and the natural. It's a reflection on a specific place as well as on the role of man in today's world.