The Stones of Palermo

*The Stones of Palermo*

In the photos of Palermo's historic centre there is no trace of humanity, no men. Men belong to another dimension, to another category of nature and creation. To another page of the Atlas. There are stones, millenary and resigned signs of dissolved civilizations. Sicily? South America? Orient? Where do these stones stagger? They have dilated and unmeasurable dimensions. Only by accident Sicily. The ruins could wink from buried cities at the margins of equatorial forests, in the Tropic of Indifference.

Ezio Ferreri photographs the historic centre - Albergheria, Ballarò, Kalsa, Vucciria - with a 10x12 large format camera in black and white. These are the ruins of the 1943 bombings never rebuilt, collapses from abandonment, gutting from the sack of Palermo. But photographed in this way, they cease to be an urban document. They become geology.

Three archetypes recur:

1. The wall as stratigraphy.* Torn tufa walls showing plaster, bricks, stone, void. A Gothic niche walled up with shapeless rubble. Windows turned into loopholes. Time is not historical, it is mineral.

2. The doorway and the balcony as blind threshold.* Huge corroded wooden doors, with the small hatch torn off revealing a Baroque curl inside. Noble balconies walled up with concrete blocks. French doors boarded up. Palaces with only façades standing, staircases suspended in mid-air leading nowhere.

3. The out-of-scale object in the void.* A small truck parked under a ten-meter ruin. A lone Panda in a deserted basalt square. A burned car in front of a Baroque fountain. Graffiti reading “IT'S RAGE IT'S LOVE”. A sign “FILET 1st CUT 12,000 LIRE” above rubble. It is the Tropic of Indifference: life goes on beside, not inside.

Midday, hard, winter light. Sharp shadow, white burned-out sky. Rigorously topographic language: central, frontal, eye-level, absolute sharpness, no man in the frame. The stones remain, resigned, from another page of the Atlas where we are no longer foreseen.