The Project

Hylonicum is an ongoing experiment that bridges photography and philosophy and its history. Like all experiments, it is based on a main hypothesis: that capturing light into a picture allows us to make visible a thick network of functions, relations, materials, and geometries that otherwise remain hidden in our daily experience of life. In its present form, the Hylonicum project runs along a number of threads focused on specific factors that characterise our shared human existence: the geometry of space, the arithmetic of social interactions, the recoding of stories, and the emergence of matter and form.

The main aim of Hylonicum is not to show nice-looking subjects, photographic virtuosity, or shots of lovely places. I imagine that technical integralists may dislike several photos included in this project, and I sincerely do not care. Photography is a powerful art increasingly pressured by the excessive use of images and by new technologies able to create great shots of the non-existent. In a world where everybody takes photos as a means to tell themselves and their networks, again and again, how good their life is, I look at what is left from this feast of appearances.

Hylonicum is about recurrence, interruption, and small failures of coherence. It does not care about beauty canons, perfect lighting, or expensive cameras. If photography is a way to freeze a human time that constantly flows towards our individual end, the same can be said of objects, machines, and their relations, both mutual and with humans. This experiment is a testimony to the failing existence of each instant and to the functional entropy in which humans, objects, cities, and landscapes equally partake.

Many of the series gathered here are structured as visual essays. If you are a casual visitor or a fellow explorer, I invite you to move slowly and notice interruptions and small failures of coherence. Light, the shaper of relations between bodies, surfaces, and distances, is the main subject of this experiment that I call Hylonicum. It gives extension and distinction to matter, revealing and concealing at once. And it is light that is reconstructed and revealed, again and again, by the structures it instantiates.