The Silent Season, Simone Padelli’s photographic project, offers a meditation on memory and belonging through the lens of one of Italy’s smallest inhabited islands—a speck of land just two kilometers around, with only about ten permanent residents in a lake in central Italy. By choosing to focus on this secluded and seemingly marginal place, Padelli embraces an ethnographic approach to photography that resists the spectacular. Instead, the author situates within the community, listening to its echoes, inhaling its silences, and engaging in what I defined “tramandanze”—acts of transmission that go beyond mere testimony to become conscious, lived, and authentic participation.
Thus, Padelli's presence on the island is not that of a distant observer, but of someone who takes the time to understand and breathe its intimate silence. The Silent Season stands out precisely because it embodies a photography that is attentive, embedded, and honest—never simply compassionate, but instead genuinely empathetic.
Padelli’s photographs of the contemporary island are interwoven with archival images. This combination creates new spaces for interpretation and imagination, producing a layered narrative that invites the viewer to move between times, to traverse traces, and to walk along paths of uncertainty. By pairing archival and present-day materials, Padelli enables new ways of seeing, opening pathways into the complex relationship between memory and place. This approach encourages us to inhabit our gaze differently, transforming it into an active, enabling force in the act of remembering and reimagining, and shaping new spaces for viewers.
At the heart of The Silent Season lies a quest for affiliation—the island—set against a world flooded with images—the surrounding lake. Padelli’s project roots itself in a specific geography and context, allowing us to search for meaning. In doing so, these photographs speak to a deep desire to re-anchor ourselves, to establish close, meaningful connections to our own being in the world—as if we, too, were an island in a lake.
Padelli writes that the island is “where getting lost and finding oneself coexist and intertwine in the same defined space.” The island seen both as a self-sufficient universe, a magical circle that encloses and protects, and a claustrophobic trap. This duality powerfully reflects the increasingly bipolar condition of the postmodern individual: hyper-connected yet ever more disoriented, lost, adrift in a sea of images, yet isolated from genuine experience. By confronting this paradox through photography, Padelli turns the island into a mirror of our own contradictions—a place that reveals how, even surrounded by infinite visual connections, we can feel profoundly alone.
Simone Padelli gives us not just a portrait of a vanishing community, but a subtle exploration of the human need to belong, remember, and see differently. The Silent Season reminds us that the spaces we inhabit—and how we choose to inhabit them—shape our sense of self, our stories, and our ability to find meaning in an ever-shifting world.
