"A MUNTAGNA"

• Photographer
  vito finocchiaro

A Muntagna, Etna Sicily Etna, called a Muntagna or Mungibeddu in Sicilian dialect, has always been considered the eternal metaphor of the existent contradiction between the sense of movement and the immobility of the landscape, the place where the kingdom of life and the realm of death meet. The very symbol of the supernatural. For centuries, its essence has moulded the collective imagination, giving the idea that all of a sudden anything can happening Sicily. A Muntagna, always unforeseeable, is able to remain sleepy for a long time, and then abruptly erupt...immobility together with mutability. A territory, the Sicilian land, where two opposite concepts coexist and define Sicily like centre and border at the same time; a place which, though motionless, gives the feeling that something is smouldering under the ashes of Mongibello and it is ready to blow up in all its expressions. This twofold nature of life and death, of fertility and ruin, in the course of time, arose and still rises feelings of wonder and steps of countless famous and not so famous explorers. They, forgetting themselves and the risk, have concluded and still conclude their experience on the top of the Muntagna, which, proud and majestic, towers above its Island and its sea. In this course of natural intimacy with my native land, emotions and imagines join in a play of symbols, the circle and the square that best express its essence. These symbols hold several evocations, even hierarchically overlapping though they do not rule out one another, and since they mutually agreed, they complement and strengthen each other, integrating in the harmony of a total synthesis. The Circle, symbol of celestial cycles, of the spiritual world, of dynamism, of the infinite nature of energy... The Square, symbol of earth, of the finite, expression of man within a space. Together, the relation between heaven and earth, between perfect and imperfect, the ambition to a new stability. Circle and square, the eternal along with the temporary, the two opposite poles that characterize the soul of our Muntagna.

Vito Finocchiaro, Sicilian class 1965. A complete artist. In him all the virtues of a personality that has a gift, a passion. "I always thought of photography as an artistic expression. For me art means research, style of the author, technique, conceptuality, use of the medium ". From his words emerges his way of living art and his being an artist, worker and creator. He learned the secrets of photography from his father and the passion for this expressive form has always been a constant in his life. Light, vision and perception the companions of his professional journey.