the right distance


In the end it is really just a matter of scale. Throughout a lifetime we do nothing but leave our markings on things and on people, on the trampled floors and on the edges of steps, or on the furnishings that we clumsily chipped. Also, there are some signs we carry with us, with time, like the trunks of trees. Only if we step out from everyday life, passing through centuries and the millennia, and we open the door of our room to what is out there, then the world talks about the more or less obvious signs that time, nature, or very often man has inflicted upon it. Yet the world body incorporates them. It is no coincidence that Gianpaolo Arena uses the most appropriate scale to watch - and through his eyes to show and describe - a microcosm. And he does so with measure, with the delicacy of the elusive observer yet with dazzling lucidity, without blurring, as if the game, however perfectly successful, is to highlight the levels of complexity with which the story of a place and its history could be told. Closed ecosystem and geological anomaly, persistent trace in the territory and virtually unassailable subject, the hill called Montello with its peculiar form which is located just south of the River Piave retains its centuries-defined character of "island", although through time it has been the mirror of many needs and attempted uses that failed when disconnected from ecology. Once a forest of oaks that Serene Republic tapped for the Arsenal, now is an example of how man affects the surface of earth, how deeply he deforms and bends the landscape to his will, inhabiting and giving his name to it, but also of how nature gradually takes hold and takes possession, preserving the merely human remnants, in a sort of regeneration. But this is only a fragment of a story that, once the scale has changed, becomes so broad that its margins cannot be read, because it is still open. In the photographic series devoted to this story by Gianpaolo Arena, thanks to a mature interpretation combined with an almost objective immediacy, the Montello becomes a story told through images, a carved stone to be read and interpreted, an inlaid necklace in whose carvings something else could be seen, without the need for explanations, as immediate responses to a living and breathing present, portents of whole lives perhaps yet to come.

Andrea Filippin-Urbanautica (translation: David Pollock)