The first words:
Paradise, Treasure, Truth.

This is the beginning:
perhaps it already contains all that is to be.
I’m searching.

The Factory of Paradiso.
Light Echoes.

An idea of a journey.
The names, the field of research,
the gathering, the recognition.

To search for an implicit inner law
to correspond to,
that guides me and takes me far away.

The genesis of the project:
Formation, Threshold, Treasure, Elsewhere.

The Tree of Paradise is the map of the Treasure.

Truth

These are the words.

Architecture: the art of making the void inhabitable.

Life in direct light,
Experience in reflected light.

Formation:
The cornerstone,
The beginning, foundation and spark,
The origin of the whole project.

Totem,
sculpture and scripture of light,
material and color.

The building is constructed starting here.
Already contains the idea of the whole and the possible.
Physically I put it at the beginning.

To create the void in the full,
Inner and outer.

To reveal the hidden,
To present the elsewhere.

“The beyond that lies within”.

Words or images?
Words and images.

Truth:
A metaphysical principle.

Reality:
That which is,
Material of immanence,
To be experienced, represented,
Communicated.

Human reality
Is the form of an indivisible present
Set between two infinite times.

“…a medium in which inner and outer worlds converge…”

Raw: the pure luminous signal,
Degree zero of vision,
The almost invisible.

To write images,
To think with the eyes.

A narrow street
That leads deep inside,
Far away.

The truth of the image
In the image.
Its laws,
To respect,
to transcend the limits
Thanks to them.

It is dream material.

Photography:
Degree zero,
exegesis of the Real.
Elsewhere, infinite Present.
Writing of Time.

One never knows.

Each scan of the image
Is its translation in numbers.

Language,
The truth of words,
The truth of the image.

The word gives existence to nothingness.
The image reveals the real,
Interprets its shadow and absence,
Appearance and fullness.

The word image makes us see.

Language stops things,
Gives them truth.

Truth names and transcends Time.

Photography as judgment and choice,
Taking a position on time
By means of light.

Reality and appearance:
To bring things to light,
To bring into presence.

Form, experience,
Void, absence and elsewhere,
In the Real lies the reason of being.

In the evidence and the limit
The appearance of being.

To create the conditions:
The truth appears.

Photography:
Responses of the Real
to thought’s questioning.

The infinite and the frame:
The mind is the means,
The mind is the limit.

Levels of Reality.

Contingent and Infinite.

Interpretations of being.

The following text, a journal and a meditation on photography and the meaning of things, was written during the making of Paradiso.

Treasure

A) Place reflecting and opaque,
sparkling and impenetrable,
secret and inaccessible,
inviolable, passable,
container of the invisible,
static.

It conceals infinite secret stories:
the time of men, unspeakable stories,
past, private and profound.

It leads elsewhere
Through sensitive surfaces.

B) The place, the surfaces, the reflections
allude to a mystery I sense laden in the space,
three floors deep, 18 meters under ground.

C) Sealed to light,
inviolable, hermetic,
without exterior.
It conceals and protects the visible.
Makes invisible.

D) The deep heart of the project,
a generating cell,
the root from which everything springs.

E) The place of departure,
a station.
Inner and outer, binary.
Dull and reflecting,
opaque and transparent.

Neutral, gray, white and black,
anonymous and mirroring.
All inside absorbs the present,
hides the invisible.

The extremely near, the extremely far.
The here and the there.

Place without scale:
small/large,
solid/flying.

F) The Present:
the ampulla, a spacecraft,
an pristine laboratory.
The Elsewhere:
the Universe out there, beyond.
The visible Infinite.

G) Here:
a station of listening and departure.
There:
a possible path, the wait and the elsewhere.

G) Inner sounds:
organic membranes, percussion,
tribal rhythm, physical and primordial.
Outer sounds:
electromagnetic radiation,
radio emissions, light echoes.

H) The secret of the possible.
A thin skin shields us frrom the invisible.
A very subtle, shining threshold.

I) Finite, infinite.
The limit permits us to look beyond.
The limit beyond which we can look.

K) The experience of the journey.
Identification between body
(voyaging subject) and place.

Experience of the place,
identity of the subject.

L) Formation:
From absolute white, from light,
descent through color
to the threshold of absolute black.
Imagination of space
by fragments, flashes,
sharply blurred pulsations.

M) As soon as you see something,
you make an image of it.
The experience of seeing,
the vision of the image,
to see (is) to re-see.

N) Movement,
interpretation of time.

A dual perception,
access to forms of the possible.
Intuition and allusion.

O) To think with the eyes:
To sculpt time (Tarkovsky)
To write time (Wolf).

Experience of the Subject,
nature of the Place.

P) The motor is an idea of journey.
The descent
The entrance
The experience (vision)
The ascent
The exit.

A real journey,
a sensory experience,
a change.

A voyage through the experience of the place crossed.

Q) Light generates,
corrupts,
accompanies toward,
takes beyond,
connects and reassembles.

Splendors,
stellar glows,
echoes of light.

R) Progress in work:
Ship’s log of the Treasure Hunt

R1) Telecine

In the darkness of post-production
the film is like clay,
it senses and responds to fingers’ contact
on sensitive dry keys.

Light translated into numbers,
matter into data,
place into chromatic fragments.

To write, to write,
to write the times,
places and spaces,
the light,
peaks, saturation and contrasts.

Recordings of invisible events,
sensitive profane traces,
silent histograms,
reflexes, glows,
continuing mutations.

The judgment is expressed by the eyes alone,
very long instants,
instantaneous meditations.

To treat the image,
the human psyche,
the idea of the place.

The becoming,
the possible vision,
the finitely other.

R2) Paint

The treatment of the image:
to deprive reality of the imperfections
the eye doesn’t catch,
the mind doesn’t bear,
the film, therefore, doesn’t accept.

From the film-clay to the Real-sculpture.

All that I make visible, exists.
That which exists, is.
The possible condenses in the being

Disguise, conceal, show through, write, lighten, discover, reappear, define, vanish:
versions of “non-being”.

Like 21st-century scribes,
we write black to say white,
summoning light through darkness.

Muybridge unveiled the mystery of movement
thanks to the still image generated inside it,
modern warlock-photographer of instant time.

We, instead,
make the stillness of suspended time dynamic,
the fragments unearthed from the indistinct whole
of things thought and not spoken.

Intelligent visual deceptions,
projected in a river
crossed by 24 frames per second.

We breathe much more slowly
than the time captured by the eyes.

Art need not astonish,
but just let appear.
Manipulating clay and light
appears the essence,
the clear core of all problems.

In order for space
to appear equal to itself,
one must apply radical,
subtle, profound metamorphosis.

The deception is real:

X and Y the coordinates.
Z the crucial point
where the image implodes:
numerical sequences,
coded rewritings of space and time.

Make, Save, Gain, Restore, Cast, Effect, Replace, Repeat, Insert, Resolve, Stretch, Undo, Reset: strip down the image till it becomes a perfect body.

R3) Compositing, Editing

The code is inscribed,
bi-uniquely defined.

Each new reformulation
Maintains structure and secret intact.

Each new permutation
Recombines the parts,
complementary,
distinct and opposite.

Offspring of the same matrix,
place, experience,
genetic architecture.

Now the place reveals the secret.
The elsewhere is (in the) present,
happening now.

Marbles and metals generate thresholds.
Positive that interfaces with negative,
the skin of the place conducts and retains.

S) All is already written,
needs only recalculating.
Re-presentation.

All is potential,
needs only enactment.

Therefore all is connected:
we reveal ourselves through images.

Paradiso post scriptum

A) All the parts of the project, of the work, of the installation are connected, interrelated.
The work obeys and respects inner laws of the place.
B) Everything that appears is in the place and of the place.
D) The work as a whole forms a place of experience.
E) The connections are: above/below, inner/outer, static/dynamic, positive/negative.
F) The place is certain, specific, material (bank, caveau, church)
G) The work has to do with:
Material data: films, walls, doors, elevators, balconies…
Immaterial instances: light, color, threshold, elsewhere…
Architecture: art of making the void inhabitable, mediator between material and immaterial, between coexisting languages.
H) The place, and the circumstance:
Are necessary and specific.
Are opportunity, possibility, vehicle.
Are the outer, the otherness.
Are intact and transformed.
R) Material and dream, dream material.