Paola De Pietri

This is the Po Plain. I have always known this landscape, and its changes are closely linked to the economic development of the post-war period. Two series of photographs are intertwined in this project: the first in large-format black and white represents trees and now uninhabited farms, most of them in ruins. Their arrangement in space is not aleatory; it reveals their past agricultural, economic and social functions, which existed only forty years ago.
Onto these ‘totemic’ images of trees and houses, smaller-format colour images of shores, herbs, cultures, birds, wild flowers, etc. are juxtaposed, in which the perception of the plain is linked to a sensorial, vital, disordered, atmospheric dimension and to the annual cycle of nature.From this point, I perceive these landscapes as the fragment of a speech the meaning of which is impossible to find, even though the disappearing, the loss and the ruin are obvious. Trees bereft of their function are free to develop following their natural calling and no longer on the basis of a utilitarian perspective.