“[…] for I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside, which stretches inland from the coast. I wonder now, however, whether there might be something in the old superstition that certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the Dog Star." Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. An ideal Arcadia has never existed. There has never been a place uncontaminated or immune to the passage of time. Humanity has continuously drawn fleeting lines that accumulate and overlap, constructing what we call landscape. The Ongoing Moment unfolds as both an itinerary and an escape. It is a narrative of encounters - people, objects, fragments - through which the human journey is inscribed. The project addresses an ordinary, seemingly marginal Italy, where nature relinquishes its mythical connotations in favor of a vernacular condition shaped by anthropization. This presence has always existed, even when sober and harmonious, responding to the necessities of everyday life - demands often harder than we tend to acknowledge. Each mark is an answer to a necessity: a trace that gradually settles, expands, blends, and loses its apparent autonomy. What emerges is a dense network of relationships and interdependencies, each carrying a unique testimonial value. The project develops from a reflection on the relationship between the singular, the familiar, and the universal, proceeding by contiguity - through the dialogue between object and image, reflection and superimposition. The intertwining of archival material with recent photographs traces thin narrative lines that lightly vibrate on a gray canvas, inhabiting a latent space to which they do not fully belong. These images speak of time as a continuous flow, and of villages that, from hilltop crests, gradually descend toward the valley’s artisanal and productive areas. What is revealed is a territory shaped by sedimentation, layers, facets, and contradictions - a place that distances itself from the pursuit of an increasingly unsatisfying aestheticism. A place capable of standing as a representation of Italy as a whole. — The images collected in this work were taken in 2023 in Fermo, Marche, with a focus on the municipality of Grottazzolina (3,382 inhabitants, ISTAT 2017). The text was written by Andrea Centoni, who lived in the places represented.