Gerace, a living stone

Gerace, a living stone. I was born in 1977 and graduated in architecture at Politecnico di Torino in 2002. Since then, I have been working as a freelance architect. I started photographing as a child when analog equipment was the only way. Photography is my means of measuring, knowing and communicating architecture, urban space and landscape. Therefore I prefer using a view camera as a surveying instrument to take the time that observation and knowing require. I consider myself an architect who works with a camera, rather than a photographer who works with architecture. I am fascinated, sometimes obsessed, by human life and its relation with the environment. A ditch in a field is meaningful like a complex building, notwithstanding its scale. Both tell us about life, society, economy, technology and the way we live on this wonderful spinning stone, lost in the universe. In July 2022 I spent several days shooting in Gerace, an ancient city on the Ionic coast. I was extremely fascinated by that place, mostly by the timeless spirit that pervades the topography and human way of inhabiting the place. There was something archaic and modern at the same time, something I tried to survey with my camera. In those days I observed different kinds of relation between human beings and natural landscape, like different overlapped layers of meaning on the ground. The following shots are an excerpt from that work. It Is a synthetic observation of the relation between man and the nature of the rocks in Gerace's landscape. In other terms, the subject is the way of inhabiting the landscape, the relation between buildings, crops and a landscape of shell-bearing limestone. This particular kind of rock is what remains of marine biological life. Buildings and agriculture are traces of human biological life: both are stones. Both tell about life, ζωή and βίος. Time merges them together, they are combined in the same rock. Shepherds' shelters, village houses, a Byzantine rock church, a Franciscan convent, an olive grove or a IIWW’s bunker built under a peak with a medieval castle perched on it: everywhere mother rock has been excavated and then up-built, according to a principle of living which is independent of a historical timeline. Cavour, 27 December 2022 Enrico Perassi

The photographic series on the village of Gerace cleverly isolates various topos, which help the observer to appreciate better the relationship between the built environment and the natural environment. Here it is still perceived, as in other parts of the Italian peninsula, within a contextual integration so different from the modern urban fabric, which in the second half of the twentieth century imposed its arrogant word on the countryside reduced to building areas. The intimate dimension of Gerace and many perched villages stem from the need for safety, and later peasant austerity, horizons of proximity or short-range mobility, and a world not yet colonized by infrastructure. Gerace speaks of a model very distant from the shapes of cities with their suburbs and miserable expansion areas, anonymous perspectives, and depressing buildings. They are spaces rather than places. Gerace recalls the desperate appeal of Pasolini, who helplessly witnessed the Italian territory massacre and the devastation of the small villages and their measured ambitions. The peasant civilization was poor and tired yet with basic needs. It grew slowly, primarily self-sufficient, in a compromise with the morphology of the environment—villages as constituent cells of a symbiotic landscape. Gerace is still the custodian of a housing and settlement concept that refers to the human scale rather than the machine and the exegesis of constructive efficiency. Nature does not respond to the paradigm of the square meter. The illusion of possession, the intoxication of things, and the psychosis of comfort have reduced humans to an atomized society of a borderless current account. The community and solidarity ethos removed from the individualistic neo-religion of speculative accumulation and land rent pro-cunning capital. Looking at these photos in their obvious objectivity, one cannot fail to appreciate the mimicry of the human footprint that rests on the stone as if in continuation with an existing paleo-drawing. It's a circumscribed, almost penitent vision so far from the carcinogenic urban planning that has produced stinging metastases, aesthetic pollution, and perverse dreams of asphalt meadows everywhere. Gerace may appear ruined to many, if not out of time. Its wrinkled face, however, does not smell of obsolescence. Like an old parchment, it seems to preserve the signs of a world not yet lost. The photographer is right to remind us that Gerace is a living stone.