Softcover with canvas dustjacket. Printrun 500 in English and 250 in Italian, signed. Design by Fiorenza Pinna, texts by Mario Vighi & Silvano Scaruffi.

This book is a personal tribute to my mountains and at the same time an awareness of its depopulation and transformation. Not so much geological but a slow change of its social and cultural fabric. Faces disappear, images get blurred, stories handed down by word of mouth often to become legends. My tribute to mountains is a tribute to (its) silence. The absence of words, this is the nature of the relationship I have with mountains. Long pauses, ancient and vital rhythms perceived in the oblivion, deep breaths, worlds that reveal themselves only through silence and that words would damage. An absence that leaves us untouched by the soundinterference and “white-noise” of human society; an absence that transforms our perspective and brings us back to our primordial perceptions. It’s words and chaos that make the silence so necessary and valuable. And in the abandoned villages what someone sees as melancholy, nostalgia, desolation and sadness, become a source of reflection and energy for me in stead. A fatalistic but positive acceptance of life and its incessant motion. Wind rages, low clouds, mist, snowstorms. A mountain, still by its nature, is then molded and shaped by these elements, charged with eternal and magnetic energies. Whenever I’m there, I perceive all this; I dialogue with the mountain and its elements, I admire its majesty and permanence. Then I compare it to the impermanence of our lives, and I feel fine.
This book is the result of close cooperation with book designer Fiorenza Pinna.
Together we met on the aspect of the poetic of walking, getting lost, looking to the past in a different way to recognize the richness of the mountains' tradition, which is a way to exist in a broad sense. A way of seeing life, speaking, eating, travel within a space; to find out that there is no visual distance between the mountainand its people. "We are the landscape".
The work on the book was a dialogue, a flux of filling and emptying. We allowed ourselves to get lost wandering along "unknown" paths. The book came out slowly, taking away a lot, trying to get to the essence. We have been working on a story line that reflected the walking aimlessly, with a pace tied to the view. There is a narrative in the story that follows a continuous line from the beginning to the end of the book, intersected by new levels, micro-stories that come in as spirals, following one another with alternating rhythm, repetition, rhyme, little harmonic labyrinths.
In this case the book is the project. In the process of making it what we were looking for became clear; the need of the glance and verbal narration.Therefore the texts, in their language, in their perfume, in the dialogues' violent wisdom are an inseparable part of the work, giving life to the landscape and leaving bodies powerfully emerge in their solitude.

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