On the night of 9 October 1963, 270 million cubic metres of rock, earth and detritus detached from the slopes of Monte Toc to which they had been clinging since prehistoric times. A gigantic landslide, over two kilometres long and one of the most destructive in human history, fell into the lake formed by the damming of the Vajont River.

I am reminded of the romantic atmospheres of Hanoi, where the smell of burnt diesel coming from thousands of buzzing mopeds blends with that of chopped and roasted lemongrass. Of the damp and heavy air in which the dizzying fumes of petrol and the natural scents of flowers are alchemically combined.

How do the water dimension of the lagoon and the specifically anthropic aspect of the beach influence your work? How important was the tension between the alteration of the physical and the temporal dimension of the places in finding a fil rouge to trace a narrative path?

Beyond holistic references and the mere contemplation or interpretation of the melancholy of the lost and forgotten landscape, nature softly recites its gradual disappearance, at least in its classical iconography. The landscape, in its distinctive traits, becomes the expression of a mutant globalized world. The unstable balance of the new geopolitics, the expansion of the global market, the tourism industry, migration flows, mutations, spatial planning, and climate change have made a decisive contribution to making distant worlds increasingly similar. In the same way historical periods also seem to have become similar. Cities are inordinately stratified by physical and cultural detritus.

What transpires is the incendiary and prophetic excitement of the free and lively youths, the fleeting hope of their vision, the frenzied and neurotic investigation of the senses, the excess of exploration and the uncertain desire for a future. Once again the static gaze of these fallen angels hides the innocence and the end of an infinite history.

Vajont used to simply refer to the valley where a river of the same name crossed. Then the landslide catastrophe, potentially triggered 30 years prior, violently manifested on the night of 9 October 1963 and gave this place its unfortunate fame.

This patchwork of signs gathers slowly and therefore, one needs to feel their way through it to grasp the system which governs its distribution, the subtle changes it is subjected to and the mechanisms through which it is formed, as well as the means in which elements are either brought together or excluded. […]