Scars

The Project

001

I was born and raised in Italy. There, in the earth and stones of the Alps and the Karst plateau, the "legacy" of the “White War" of 1915-18 is engraved for ever.
What do the karst trenches, the alpine fortresses carved into the flanks of inaccessible mountains and the picturesque villages reduced to heaps of rubble and never rebuilt have in common to the scattered places of prayer, the miles of minefields and the bunkers that spoil and break the line of the Golan Heights and Jordan Valley landscape?

002

The silence, the absence of the man, the fierce resistance of iron and cement to a Nature that tries to reclaim what is her own, to erase and hide from sight the effects of war to heal the wounds that have been inflicted on her.

003

Photographing the traces of war and the scars it has made to the landscape is like making a portrait of History. To this rule, the places here portrayed are no exception.
The visual testimonies of the six-day war start on the Golan Heights. They continue through the Jordan Valley, at Qasr el Yahud. Eventually, these testimonies finish in the desert of Judaea and on the shores of Gaza..

004

The task of documentary photography with regards to the theme of war’s landscape helps reflecting and remembering: often these ruins are the only remaining witnesses of a tragedy that has overwhelmed the lives of thousands of people. Only in this perspective silence and absence can be filled: the absence of displaced persons, as well as the deaf screams of the dead and the fallen.