About This Project

http://www.silviamontevecchi.com

This photograph makes part of a project entitled The state of being light, which is inspired to one of Italo Calvino’s “Six memos for the next millennium”: Lightness. The project is a search for the same lightness described by Calvino, which can be seen as a particular kind of beauty. It’s the delicate beauty we can glimpse in an unexpected balance, in a harmonious asymmetry, in a pleasant accord between solids and voids. It is the lightness of atoms, minute and invisible particles that combined form all that is material; it’s the lightness of the spiderweb and of the fragments of glass, the sense of suspension and calm silence that only the moonlight can instill; it’s the lightness of all what is volatile and in transformation. But it’s also the light though, the one which is lively and vibrant but not superficial at all, a way of thinking that, when life appears like a confused intertwine of infinite possible ways to walk, allows to hover above them, contemplate them as a whole, and to achieve the clearness to manage with this with lightness and resolution. This project is both a tribute to the lightness described by Calvino and a search for that same lightness, a way to express my personal perception of it in a visual form and to get closer to a light thoughtfulness. I chose to represent this through the delicate and complex shapes of nature and by drawing inspiration from the moon, her sharp contour, the silver magic of her beams and the calm depth of her blue shadows, by playing with the balance between full and empty spaces and trying to free the images from any weight.