© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

Walking in the desert is getting lost, questioning oneself, getting lost "watching." In this case, however, we are not in an aesthetic lyricism like the one reproduced in the book of the same name by Mimmo Jodice (Jodice Mimmo (2007), Perdersi a guardare, Contrasto), but in the sense of disorientation, in which getting lost coincides with losing one's certainties. We are suddenly spectators of a barren place; the familiarity of the luxuriant and lively landscape, such as woods, is supplanted by the stone's aridity. An environment where things seem to repeat themselves with a disarming repetitiveness, where anyone of us can lose the road and the self.

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

With "No Code" Stefano Parrini takes us in a dry landscape, in which we must learn to stay, beyond any possible understanding. Understanding also means welcoming, embracing, making one's own. Thus, as aliens, these Martian landscapes emerge in our minds to be encoded as something other than us. The caves' depth becomes a gorge into which to disappear, a place of mystery, in opposition to the idea of ​​possible refuge. The stone walls are monumental obstacles that have been lying there for millennia, eternal compared to the short human life.

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

The urgency that we read in Stefano Parrini's photographs arises, in fact, from "archaeological" work. With a non-casual mastery of the technique, the photographer composed a path through images that could induce a sense of disorientation in the viewer and generate questions with no answer. In the contemporary world, where man has been able to encode and break down almost everything, Stefano's photographs instead bring us back to unfathomable objects. Thus, the stone becomes synonymous with a mystery, in which the viewer can observe and reflect in contemplative silence. This series of images does a complex job of questioning human certainties and carries out a real conceptual turnaround: the stones bring us back to silence, broken only by the roar of the explosion of a volcano. We could interpret all this in light of the progress that science has made over the centuries. In addition to unveiling the mechanisms that govern the world, it has begun a path of secularization that has no longer slowed down its course from the time of the Enlightenment. In a long and continuous struggle, the contemporary world seems to be no longer able to deal with the unexplored, with the mystery.

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

Here, then, that the photographs of "No Code" come back to remind us of all this through an almost archetypal emergence. As C. G. Jung himself had argued, archetypes can be perceived as images that emerge from the unconscious, and that cannot be described but only circumscribed. Therefore, the image, as a significant nucleus, enriches the contents of the psyche as a fundamental experience ( Jacobi Jolande (1973), La psicologia di C.G. Jung, Bollati Boringhieri.), a primordial model that emerges, which becomes presence. The hierophanies of this photographic series seem to have been composed precisely for this purpose. The black and white are not contrasted, flattened; dazzling lights of mirrors; solarizations: all these artifices frame a complex "semantics of mystery," in which we increasingly move away from reality to get in touch with another world.

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

Therefore, far from wanting to be a document, the photographs can be reassembled as part of a dream journey in which the camera overturns its perspective. It is no longer an eye that interprets reality outside the photographer; on the contrary, it becomes a threshold from which to enter the unconscious of those who use it. Taking up an expression dear to W. Benjamin, the camera becomes a way of discovering a sort of "optical unconscious."

«It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. Details of structure, cellular tissue, with which technology and medicine are normally concerned—all this is, in its origins, more native to the camera than the atmospheric landscape or the soulful portrait. Yet at the same time, photography reveals in this material physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things—meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable.» Walter Benjamin: an excerpt from 'Little History of Photography, 1931

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

While Benjamin's optical unconscious designates the infinite possibilities that the photographic device offers to man, freezing movement, magnifying microscopic particles, we intend here instead to take up this expression to describe a very different path. "No Code" is an introspective work, the elements of which make up a grammar of the imagination that cannot be deciphered except by relying on one's deepest feelings. Thus, the rock becomes the bearer of mystery, the point of contact between the human and the divine. (The stone represents, in many cultures, an element of contact with the divinity. From St. Peter, who founded the Church of Rome on a stone («And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it», Matthew 16.18), to the black stone of Mecca, the Ka'aba, a pilgrimage destination.) However, to speak, are those same stones that remain difficult to decipher in their symbolism: menhirs, caves, alignments of boulders dating back to more than 5000 years ago. The images, therefore, compose a symphony; they aggregate one another like the mythemes, the recurring elements of the myth identified by Claude Levi Strauss. (Levi-Strauss Claude (1971), Mythologiques, Plon. ) It's in their entirety that it is possible to grasp their true meaning.

© Stefano Parrini from the series 'No Code'

So, what remains after Stefano Parrini's immersion into the unconscious? Well, there remains the feeling of an empty scream, of a need for silence in an increasingly crowded and chaotic world, the need to say nothing more, because too much has now been said.

Stefano Parrini (website)