Barn’s burnt down

now
I can see the moon *

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The series of pictures “Barn’s burnt down” is dedicated to the disastrous series of earthquakes that hit central Italy in 2016. Hundreds of villages have been cancelled and there are currently 40,000 people without a house. “The house” is the fulcrum of a general problem of Italy, where every five years disastrous natural events contribute to the destruction of what is Italy’s characteristic : the presence of a unique landscape, the result of millenary harmony between building and orography, including human shapes and forms of nature.

The fault of the innumerable disasters is unfortunately to be found in the same people who built their homes. As is known, Italy is a country with high seismic risk, but most of the houses are hundreds of years old and they have not been renovated or have been renovated without following the earthquake standards, much more expensive.

In fact the houses not up to standard, even after a mild earthquake collapse, the walls badly connected to the floors fall sideways, the floors fall on deaf ears and crush everything. The shock from the ground moves the foundations, the lower floors oscillate and push over the top ones. But it ‘s the second shock, which arrives in the opposite direction, that breaks the building as bones on the ice.

For this reason, the same houses of love become places of death and rubble.

The photographic subject of the series is the “rubbles-houses” collapsed on themselves precisely because of the earthquake. They are a symbol of the destructive power of nature and also they carry a “dramatic harmony”. Despite the fact that these houses are image of rubble and death, they also preserve a precarious aesthetic balance. The main topic of that series of pictures is to capture this “dramatic harmony” of the rubbie-houses.

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* Haiku composed by Mizuta Masahide (1657–1723). He was a seventeenth-century (Edo period) Japanese poet and samurai who studied under Matsuo Bashō.