We pass meaning to places. Geography does not exist unless we observe it, name it, or express its characteristics by words or signs. And this has been clear to science and modern physics for a century: objects do not exist except in the event and in relation to the beholder. Above all, the Piadena photographed by Alessandro Zanoni is a place that emerges from personal experience, a pouring forth of memories and interpretations filtered through cinema, music, literature, or other people’s images. It is, therefore, a well-founded and not an accidental vision, easy to grasp when embraced by the dark, dense, and sinister atmosphere, painted with “light that has broken out into disintegration,” in words taken by Marco Belpoliti from his Pianura (Einaudi, 2021).

Zanoni grew up and still lives in Piadena, but the domicile does not always coincide with one’s place. And for this reason, we often quest for our homeland as if it were necessary to pay tribute to our origins. Piadena is a land plan devoted to extensive agriculture, at times immeasurable, and to peculiar anonymity, which, like the winter fog, prevents us from seeing clearly. Yet in this inevitable and muffled silence, in the nocturnal discretion, through the re-signification of the banal or brutal, Zanoni’s geography takes shape in a humid condensation that vaporises the landscape. And that veil of estranging indeterminacy accompanying the vision seems to redeem a right to dream often denied in the provinces.

The viewer, like Zanoni himself, remains a spectator, outside the action, on the threshold of an escape, aware of the neorealist sunset of the peasant myth. It is no coincidence that we move between railway tracks and asphalt, peeling facades, common non-places, artefacts, and uncertain presences, along the silent flow of ditches, poised between nostalgia and dull modernity. It’s more than a wait, a suspension, a holding of breath in the face of a spell that is hard to explain. As if dazzled by lights on nothing.

Steve Bisson
Urbanautica Institute