Book 'Elementary Hierophanies and Decoding of the Gaze' by Stefano Parrini
Today we are witnessing two major epoch-making movements: the return of the great space missions, a symbol of new hope for humanity, for humanity understood as the West; and a recent, vast, and uncontrollable crisis of the collective presence given by the unstoppable acceleration of global warming, with all the dramatic consequences that we are beginning to know with dismay.
These are not new perspectives; scientists, artists, and writers have been questioning the destinies of our planet for decades. However, if until recently, we could still speak of destinies in the plural because multiple strategies could still reverse the route; now, in 2022, it seems complicated to find even the word "tomorrow" in our thoughts.
© Stefano Parrini, Untitled #36 from the series 'No Code', 2020
Stefano Parrini's photographs oscillate between these two movements, definitively removing the veils of the latest technological illusion and forcing us to be alone with the desert, the place par excellence of existential absolutes.
The plural returns: the possible destinies we have lost have been transformed into an assortment of solitudes and silences, infinite yet closed, impenetrable, straight spaces destined never to meet.
Book 'Elementary Hierophanies and Decoding of the Gaze' by Stefano Parrini
Book 'Elementary Hierophanies and Decoding of the Gaze' by Stefano Parrini
Book 'Elementary Hierophanies and Decoding of the Gaze' by Stefano Parrini
They could be frames - fragments - of the last space mission, testimony to the desperation of man in search of a new world. Or they could be images returned by one of the countless cameras that today record the frenzy of our cities, the only surviving glimpse of the dust and emptiness that await us; or, again, images from the past of our planet, when existence was bubbling shapeless in the bowels of the Earth.
© Stefano Parrini, Untitled #28 from the series 'No Code', 2020
But who receives these images and why?
"Even if the show was a funeral, it was impossible not to think, with a kind of bitter smile, how much the material had tried to ignite, like two splinters of silica rubbed on each other, the insignificant flame of life". (Translation from the Author from Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoide, tr. Bruno Mazzoni, ilSaggiatore, 2021, p. 435)
As I move through the volume pages, these words of the Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu resound to me. I think we no longer know how to find a way that can give us back the meaning of our existence. Probably because we forgot the marveling fact that, among billions of possibilities, life has managed to emerge and blossom, even if only for a tiny parenthesis in the enormous time of the universe.
Book 'Elementary Hierophanies and Decoding of the Gaze' by Stefano Parrini
Book 'Elementary Hierophanies and Decoding of the Gaze' by Stefano Parrini
Thus the deserts speak to those seeking a spark in the darkness suffocating us or those who want to call it god. And those who cannot give it a name know that it exists and that its existence is the only true miracle we are allowed to experience and which we have almost completely forgotten.
© Stefano Parrini, Untitled #22 from the series 'No Code', 2020
For some time, I have been developing the idea that, for photography to rediscover meaning, it must forget itself and resume the path of representation, once again being a tool for something else, for something more substantial.
The human being began his journey through history by leaving us the images of the legendary aurochs, the signs that an unknown hand has traced on the rock so that we do not forget and have the stability of memory behind us. Yet today that the very possibility of memory is called into question by an ever shorter present, suffocated by a fragile and uncertain future; it becomes necessary to trace new images and leave new signs, which can speak, through the fears and needs of today, to the humanity of tomorrow.
Book 'Elementary Hierophanies and Decoding of the Gaze' by Stefano Parrini
Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoide, tr. Bruno Mazzoni, ilSaggiatore, 2021;
Byung-Chul Han, La scomparsa dei riti.Una topologia del presente, tr. Simone Aglan-Buttazzi, nottetempo, 2021;
Ernesto de Martino, La fine del mondo. Contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali, Einaudi, 1977;
Stefano Catucci, Imparare dalla Luna, Quodlibet, 2013;
Giuseppe Frazzetto, Nuvole sul grattacielo. Saggio sull’apocalisse estetica, Quodlibet, 2022.
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