Palermo during the Pandemic

*Palermo pandemia* is the after day. If “In Sicily. Chronicles of the Last Landscape” documented the last landscape before erosion, here we are already beyond. We are inside the rupture.

The photographs were taken during the Covid-19 lockdown, in the days of enforced silence. The places we have always associated with overcrowding, noise, and swarming — Ballarò in the mid-morning, Il Capo, the Politeama, the Foro Italico, the train station, the fish market, via della Libertà — are completely deserted. Not a person. Not a dog. Not a passing car. Only the buildings remain, watching.

It is a Palermo never seen before and yet strangely familiar, because it is the city stripped of its theatrical function. Without the humanity that inhabits it, architecture loses its domestic scale and reveals its monumental and at the same time fragile nature. Noble palaces, baroque churches, housing blocks, closed kiosks, lowered shutters: everything appears as a backdrop, a stage set waiting for someone to re-enter the scene, or as a relic of a civilization just extinct.

The feeling, deliberately, is apocalyptic. Not in the spectacular sense of the term, but in the etymological one: _apokalypsis_, revelation. The virus, invisible in the photos, reveals what the city is when we are not there. And it forces us to ask how much of that fullness was necessary and how much was just clutter.

Ferreri works by absolute subtraction. No effects, no rhetoric of the aestheticized void.

The light chosen by Ferreri is always the same, that apocalyptic light you rightly defined: blue hour, between dusty pink and cobalt blue, with streetlamps already on and the sky still bright. A suspended light that transforms every place into an abandoned set.

The perspectives are central, almost frontal, as if the lens wanted to measure absence. There is no pietas, no denunciation. There is the cold and painful observation of a suspended humanity.

In this sense “Palermo pandemia” is the necessary negative of the other works: if before the landscape was threatened by an excess of human presence — illegal building, highways, lighting — here it is threatened by its total absence. And it is perhaps even more disturbing. The city appears as if after a biblical exodus, like Pompeii the day after, without ash.

Only the buildings remain. Mute witnesses of an interrupted life, waiting to see if we will return the same.