Tabula Rasa

Property. This painful problem - being somewhere - I have not solved at all, writes Gilles Clément quoted by Emilia Valenza. In Sicily property is a suffering, an obsession transformed into the dream of generations of emigrants: sending money home to buy land, to build the house for the return.

This remittance materializes in unfinished constructions scattered across the island. It is the umbilical cord never cut with Sicily.

They are partial buildings, unfinished villas and small apartment blocks rising in new expansion areas, without sewage connection, with exposed brick facades, balconies without parapets, blind openings, celibate staircases. And above all the ferri di richiamo - the rebars of pillars destined for future elevations, soaring and cut against the void like an indeterminate intention to be handed down to successive generations. The never-finished that meanwhile fulfills its function: dwelling. Or remains suspended in a spatiotemporal limbo as an inconclusive polyhedron.

Ida Parlavecchio writes that Ferreri's cycle is not reportage nor objective mapping. It rather resembles a journey that is a getting lost through provinces, a déjà-vu of what could have been.

Here technique becomes thesis: pinhole without lenses, long exposure times, old tungsten-balanced slide films developed in C41.

What does it produce? Valenza writes: the image of supra-temporal places, with skies heavy with lead and yellows thick as limestone. Chromaticisms that make geographic coordinates unequivocal - we are in that south where heat dismembers contours and sun dazzles rough facades - but at the same time make them unrecognizable.

Pinhole gives total depth of field, blur, aleatory movement, angular immersive cuts. Reality becomes aleatory, rarefied. Constructions have been there for an indefinite time and tell of a time without rules, of that originary chaos that one day will have its form. Today it is an insipid reality and photography provides consciousness so as not to fall into oblivion.

As Marc Augé observed, they are spaces that sometimes awaken memories. We do not know if it is Sicily or the Middle East. It is pure psychogeography. It is the project dreaming itself, in the manner of a ferro di richiamo.