PHENOMENA
PHENOMENA
Photographs by Sara Palmieri
First edition of 150 copies
cm 26×19,5
134 pp.
Canvas softcover + embossing
Wire binding
With a text by Beatrice La Tella
Editing by Martha Micali
Graphic design by Klim Kutsevskyy
Text editing by Andrea Cafarella
English translation by Cecilia Moraci
Published by DITO Publishing
9791280304124
October 2022
PHENOMENA is a book that calls into question the hierarchies between man and nature. It discusses power relations, resource manipulation. Through a deep understanding of the hidden levels of natural phenomena in relation to social ones, the photographer succeeds in constructing an allegory of the creation of nature. The book proposes a thesis, and food for thought: why does man create fictitious images and atmospheres in an attempt to make nature a piece of furniture? Why does man not experience his relationship with nature directly but must filter it in order to tolerate it? It has to do with control. It has to do with a fear. The presented series, which brings together the artist's discourse in a very broad way, has become an opportunity to reflect on these issues. Writer Beatrice La Tella then dialogued with the images to create a text of great evocative power, a kind of chorus that moves more or less silently along with the images.
Sara Palmieri's PHENOMENA contracts time by redefining the space occupied by humanity in relation to nature, its scenarios of representation, imagination and control. It breaks the boundaries of what is perceived real by letting an often invisible dimension emerge. Through a deep understanding of natural phenomena in relation to social ones, the photographer constructs an allegory of creation that questions hierarchies, power relations, manipulation and resources exchanged between nature and man.
The series presented brings together three different projects of the artist by placing them together, in a new, unprecedented editorial form under the name PHENOMENA: phenomena, natural and man-made, that surround us and that we can see, must see, in order to preserve our relationship with the planet. Guiding us through the journey is a small white bird-the book's first photograph-that starts in the dark and returns to the dark in the final pages, telling us about a world corrupt, but not yet finished.
Completing the edition is writer and poet Beatrice La Tella, who dialoguing with the images has created a text of great evocative power, a sort of chorus that resonates in between the white spaces along with the journey of the little bird/cicerone: "He has inhabited everything, man. / With his hands he has conquered all that unwary has run toward him."