Flash Back

The photographs in this third section were taken in 2000, through the streets and inside the houses of Old Poggioreale.

Here the photographic language returns to its origins: an essential, frontal black & white that in itself is the idea of a flashback. No more installations, no more emulsion lifts. Only the crystallized time of the places.

If the first two sections brought objects back to life or made them speak, here Ferreri leaves them exactly where the January ‘68 earthquake left them. Abandoned objects, flayed wallpapers, school desks left empty for over thirty years waiting for pupils who will never return, doorways flung open forever by the violence of the quake.

It is a work of crossing through. The staircase of Piazza Elimo climbing towards the tower, now overgrown with weeds. A fig tree growing in front of a door and sealing it. The carcass of a Autobianchi A112 in the garage of a collapsed house. A single school desk isolated in the middle of a classroom with the plaster in shreds. Splügen beer bottles and crumpled leaflets of the Democrazia Cristiana from 1960-1964 in the dust. A single bottle on a marble shelf. A woman's shoe abandoned on the stairs.

Details captured along the streets of the town, interiors where the memory of the past can still be glimpsed. There is no longer any need to evoke the ghosts. They are there, in the mute evidence of things.