Intent

This is not a peaceful exhibition.

This is a violent exhibition, and deliberately so. No one in their right mind would buy these images as artworks; they are not decorations but lacerating stabs, deep wounds that none of us would hang in plain sight like a painting of the crucifixion.

Its first purpose is to disturb. To disturb the comfort of sleeping consciences, those who prefer to turn the other way, those who discuss the reasons for war as if reasons could exist — those who, from the cozy warmth of their own walls, sheltered in the shade of a pension and of small and large comforts, babble theories steeped in a cruel peace. A peace that condemns the weak and crowns the strong. A peace that elects as leaders the new sadistic caricatures, revolting tumors that history — worse than yesterday — hands us today, smiling.

I do not seek your consent.

I do not seek your understanding.

I seek your discomfort.

Because only those who feel uneasy before painful migrations and bloody wars, made of boys sent to lose their youth — some with blood, some with the heart — are still alive inside.

I built these images one by one, with my hands and my mind, knowing they would hurt. Not out of sadism, but out of necessity. Because art that does not disturb is decoration. And I do not make decorations in times of war.

Every work is an indictment. Not of the executioners alone — they are obvious, almost banal in their infamous ferocity. The accusation is aimed at those who look and do not see. At those who know and stay silent. At those who choose silence because silence costs nothing, at those who choose the plot "of others" to decline any serious responsibility for their own apathy, their own absence from reality.

At us — if we are among those who stay silent, and do not give the victims back their true worth.

I am a photographer. I have always believed that an image could do what words dare not. Today I no longer believe it enough — and for that I had to go further. I have manipulated, burned, buried the photographs under layers of meaning, until they became something more than reality. Until they became truth.

Biography

Maurizio Marcato has been photographing for half a century, but that is not what matters. Here. Now.

Abyssosfera is born from observing an indifference he sees every day — toward those who die far away, erased from images even before memory. Thousands of boys die every day without even being counted or told. But this work does not aim to inform. It wants to be a punch in the stomach for those who have stopped feeling, for those who do not want to feel.