“If you visit Sicily, you cannot leave without visiting the volcano. Etna is, like all active volcanoes, (in fact, even more due to its unique majesty) the meeting point between black and white, heaven and hell, beauty and terror.

Only those who have at least one window facing Etna can truly understand the primordial situation that it creates: today we are here because She allows us to do so. Here in this magical place where very little is needed to overturn the equilibrium. The locals (and even more the visitors) are very small and that’s how I wanted to picture them: like curious non-entities made of colours, smells and sensations of a land that boils from within.

Even more than any other photograph I made, the human element here is truly just a silhouette, a figure wandering around. I see them starting their walk with a promise to themselves to make, this time, a mystical journey and they end up, perhaps, talking of everyday things. Isn’t this what follows a moment of spirituality? Descending into everyday life while observing the climate and the landscape?

In this same way I imagine the inhabitants: the same ones which have at least one window facing Etna and meditate on those silhouettes that wander around, perhaps I consider them a little naïve for being there and just thinking of who knows what. But in the end, it makes no difference whether the thoughts at stake are deep or not, mystical or futile. It only matters the Volcano with its black and scorching earth.”

Photography | Marco Gehlhar & Alice Fassi

The project “Nekros” was carried out in different sites through Greece, in particular on the island of Milos.

The Greek word “Nekros” , as employed in Omero’s Odissey, has two different connotations , meaning “corpse “ but also “defunct”, the latter representing something that has a life – after life itself. Something very much alive or at least vital although in a very different way from life as we think of it.

Once disowned and forgotten an object loses its purpose, letting itself go to be engulfed by the embrace of nature. – Abandoned – they abandon themselves to the flow of things, finding a new balance. It is the end of an existence, or a return to before “being”, a release from the the fatigue of meaning.

A sense of peace emanates from this loss of purpose. Buildings, vehicles and everyday objects sleep silently, camouflaged in nature as if wanting to go unnoticed, yet striking in their armony with the environment as if becoming a monument to a lost memory.