In Sicily. Chronicles of the Last Landscape.

*In Sicily, Chronicles of the Last Landscape*

“In Sicily. Chronicles of the Last Landscape” is a visual essay that traverses the island as a stratigraphy, from geological time to the day after.

The journey begins with the primordial landscape: Etna at sunrise with its pink plume, the Cyclops Islands in Acitrezza under the moon, the motionless papyrus of the Ciane river, the hills of the hinterland dissolved in haze. A Sicily without human figures, stripped for once of the burden of its millennial architecture, returned to its magmatic nature, to the very genesis of the island - volcano and ruin, new stone lava and a scent of imminent end.

From the primordial, the narrative slips towards the human sign in harmony. Here, as Giosuè Calaciura writes in the critical text accompanying the work, _the hands of men have been an extension of nature, a circumspect partner, a respectful co-author_. These are the dry stone walls of Favignana with Levanzo in the background, the white dirt roads running straight to the sea with a single tree on the horizon, the vineyards of Salina with Filicudi and Alicudi behind, the farmhouses in ploughed wheat where furrows become writing, the vineyards under snow reduced to pure graphics. It is the cultivated, measured landscape, where stones, animals, men but also sky and sea coexist without belligerence.

The third chapter is that of the castle as an extension of the rock. Mongialino with its two towers on the ridge, Cefalà Diana, Sperlinga, Mussomeli - fairytale names that are not built “on” the landscape, but “are” landscape. As Salvatore Davì notes in the second critical text, it is here that Ferreri entrusts photography with the task of building an identity discourse.

The last chapter is suggested, rather than shown, with modesty. As Calaciura writes again, the disaster is _a few millimeters beyond the edge of the photograph_. Behind the tuff quarry cut like a Burri score, one senses the institutional illegal building of seaside villas. After the bend in the track, the illogical ribbon of a motorway opens up, stratifying fields sown with an ancient and now incomprehensible grammar. And then the light trails of the viaduct at night - tormented lights running senselessly, towards the night - and finally Giampilieri: the landslide, the crumpled cars, the alluvial gravel on the guardrail. The day after.

Ultimately, as Davì synthesizes, this is _the last remaining landscape, the last landscape before the technologically advanced erosion of man, the last deeply kinesthetic landscape before returning to the grid of the urban context_.

Ferreri does not denounce. With pity and anger, he documents the end of a season: the Sicilian frontier, a laboratory of hybridizations between human imagination and the feverish industriousness of nature, close to homologation and evisceration. A low flight over the island that tells itself as if it were the whole world, and that reminds us, with its sumptuous presumption, that another way of being in the world was possible.