Fracture

Whenever you are in a place that manifests recognizable images or signs, that place becomes like a book, a text in which all perceptible signs become grammatical elements useful for its reading. These signs are perceived in a subjective way, reworked and reinterpreted by those who observe them. The process of places reading implies understanding its nature and its reasons for being. The landscape is nothing more than the fruit of the hand of man in the space from which derive forms, compositions and transformations. The landscape is a work product, it is always the result of a desire and a design projected into the future. This design has a beginning, an evolutionary process, some enrichment and crises phases that lead not to his death but to the attainment of a "other" phase than to the original design. Is what you think when you catapult into one of the many pieces of disused mining landscape in the Sulcis Iglesiente. A place designed on the basis of a landscape redesign that at that time changed its original character. There is a dimension inversion, where the bottom comes to the surface, where the morphology soft lines of the of the place replace sharp cuts. Breakdowns and mouths introduce underground. From the second half of the 1800 Sardinia becomes nodal point of the Mediterranean as regards mineral deposits. The intense mining activity and the exploitation of the territory dramatically changed the image of the pre-existing landscape by activating a process of transformation that still today has profound implications. Excavations, subtraction of soil, construction of real underground cities shape a new habitat. What remains of this profound landscape change is a seemingly stationary hybrid place, but actually awaiting. Is a place made of abandoned villages, which still undergoes episodes of morphological adjustment due to the intense underground activity. Constant soil collapse creates huge chasm, like large theatres where the continuous process of adaptation of the place to the past mining activity takes place. The theme of the abandonment, the residue, the "collapse" are now the starting points for the conversion of these new and contemporary territorial landmarks. The photographic project wants therefore to tell the products and the figures of this process through images that narrate of matter, of chromia, of the continuous search of balance between the natural the artificial. Tells of new relationships between full and empty, between the top and the bottom, of axes, of new landmark and of physical and figurative distances.

The human being is an instrumental animal that defines and evolves through the use of artifacts, inventions, tools, weapons, and so on. Unlike other animal species, the human being tames the fire to heat the cave, the house, to protect himself from dangers, to eat; tames the wind to produce energy, to navigate the seas and rivers, tames the water to drink, wash, move things; tame the land to grow food, raise animals, produce objects, extract useful resources. This is the story of the human being who becomes aware of itself through the tools he imagine/invent and that develops memory to increase skills. And in doing so, the human species shapes nature and defines new landscapes. In these landscapes, however, Man also deposits ruins, scraps, signs, wounds. And therefore Man produces entropy with which the universe feeds itself since the very start. In this photographic project, we observe traces of this transformation process. But what does all this tell us? The human species has the strength to interfere with the world, and is capable of changing the balance very quickly, to the point of feeling an unease, of understanding that the fruit of human progress generates melancholy, stress, removal of references, and identity. A fracture that can poison the earth, the air, the water, and therefore threaten that original ability to dominate the elements. In the series 'Fracture' by Cédric Dasesson we find the visual stimuli to understand this human condition and ask ourselves how and how much we differ from it.