© Francesco Sammarco, "Aporias of Transition"

There is something unsettling about looking at the earth from above. From the aerial’s detached, almost disembodied perspective, the landscape reveals itself as a skin: a surface inscribed with traces, scars and ruptures, where the apparent continuity of the territory is constantly interrupted by the marks of human intervention. In Francesco Sammarco’s "Aporias of Transition", the construction corridor of the Naples–Bari High-Speed Rail line becomes a landscape in the process of being rewritten, its familiar contours opened up by trenches, fences, excavations and provisional roads. The infrastructure project appears less as a promise of connection than as an incision in the living body of the land.

© Francesco Sammarco, "Aporias of Transition"

© Francesco Sammarco, "Aporias of Transition"

© Francesco Sammarco, "Aporias of Transition"

Moving between ground-level proximity and aerial reconnaissance, Sammarco constructs a double vision. From below, the construction site is encountered through its material presence, its obstructions and its immediate impact on the surrounding environment. From above, it becomes a larger territorial diagram, a network of cuts and displacements that exposes the asymmetries hidden within the rhetoric of progress. The land becomes both image and evidence, its surface bearing witness to transformations whose consequences extend beyond the visible boundaries of the construction site.

© Francesco Sammarco, "Aporias of Transition"

These are landscapes suspended between what has been and what is yet to come. Their temporariness is not simply a matter of unfinished works or provisional arrangements, but a condition in which the present is repeatedly sacrificed to an anticipated future. The wounds remain visible even as they are framed as necessary steps towards development. And what happens when such wounds become ordinary? When excavated earth, severed paths and fragmented horizons cease to provoke a response? Sammarco’s images raise an uncomfortable question: can the repeated exposure to environmental disruption produce a form of collective trauma, one that takes shape through the slow normalisation of damage? Perhaps the most troubling aspect of these landscapes is not their visible devastation, but the possibility that we may eventually learn to look at them without truly seeing them.

© Andrea Lazzaroni, "Beyond the River"

Transnistria — literally, “beyond the Dniester” — suggests a condition of passage, a territory defined by its position on the other side of a boundary.  A self-declared republic whose political status remains unresolved, Transnistria inhabits a peculiar temporal dimension, where the past has not entirely receded and the future remains difficult to imagine.

© Andrea Lazzaroni, "Beyond the River"

© Andrea Lazzaroni, "Beyond the River"

Andrea Lazzaroni approaches this landscape without the urgency of the correspondent or the explanatory ambition of the documentary survey. Returning repeatedly over several summers, he develops a quieter form of attention, allowing the region to emerge through the ordinary textures of its surroundings. Broad avenues, apartment blocks, monuments, mosaics and houses of culture coexist with railway lines, industrial structures and the expansive fields of wheat and sunflowers. These are not simply remnants of the Soviet era, preserved as historical curiosities or relics. They belong to a material vocabulary of a vanished political order that continues to shape everyday experience. What might appear elsewhere as an obsolete landscape remains here an intimate, inhabited reality.

© Andrea Lazzaroni, "Beyond the River"

There is a peculiar temporality in these scenes: a sense that something has ended without quite disappearing, and that something else is approaching without ever fully arriving. The photograph holds this interval open. 
In Transnistria, the passage of time seems to have accumulated unevenly. Political history speaks of frozen conflicts and contested borders, yet the rhythms of rural life continue, indifferent to the need for a definitive historical narrative. Lazzaroni’s photographs invite us to look a territory that exists intensely in its own contradictions. This act of looking it's not intended to preserve these contradictions, but rather to invite viewers to consider the place of such territories in a world that seeks to standardise, regulate and orthopaedise everything, until little remains that resists classification. Photography becomes an act of attention towards what persists outside the dominant narrative of progress.

The city has an organic appearance. In the Quartieri Spagnoli, Marco Callegari’s captures the small, everyday "secret" arrangements through which people make the streets their own. Laundry hanging between buildings, plastic sheets covering doorways, votive shrines, parked scooters and makeshift repairs create unexpected compositions. Like temporary sculptures, these arrangements appear and disappear, often changing from one day to the next. They tell us how people adapt to their surroundings, bringing private life into the streets and finding practical solutions to the limits of urban space.

© Marco Callegari, "Napoli Segreta"

Callegari photographs these details frontally, paying attention to the colours, textures and materials that give Naples its distinctive character: the blue of plastic, the worn surfaces of tuff stone, the combination of metal, fabric and improvised structures. His images reveal a kind of everyday visual language, shaped by habit and necessity rather than design. Using an iPhone, he records these scenes discreetly, preserving ephimeral moments of belonging.

© Marco Callegari, "Napoli Segreta"

© Marco Callegari, "Napoli Segreta"

Callegari sees the streets of Naples as a series of canvases on which inhabitants leave traces of their improvised gestures and unexpected interventions made up of ordinary things. In this way, the city acquires a distinctive character, preserving a sense of surprise in the way its streets are inhabited. The work also invites us to reflect on how, by insisting on regulating every detail, smoothing out irregularities and bringing urban spaces into a single order, we risk making all cities look alike. Perhaps those secrets, those fleeting arrangements manifest as well a form of the city’s heritage.

© Marco Callegari, "Napoli Segreta"

Together, these three projects remind us that looking is always a temporary encounter with the world, and photography a tool to notice that places are never quite the same twice. And photographers sometimes they put a flea in our eyes, to tease a dormant navigation that no longer wishes to question the world, as rocks jutting out of the ocean, forcing us to sharpen our gaze.