This photography belongs to my series "Summer is gone". The project is an inquiry about time through the transformation of a beach across one year inspired by a poem by Arsenij Tarkovsky.
We are on the northern coast of Italy, where the beach every summer becomes a never-ending series of exclusive beach establishments.
I wanted to leave summer off-screen and portray these same beaches starting from when the beach establishments are dismantled in autumn. The shapes get simpler and the beach shines again in all its nakedness.
Then comes the winter that sows chaos, breaks the forms and transforms, destroys, and buries under a mantle of sand the remainings of the summer.
In spring, the first excavators appear to return everything to its fragile and artificial order, and with them, all these strange, metaphysical objects reappear. They are all elements of our idea of summer, but still in-progress. A stick, a piece of parasol, a mirror placed in the void…
At the end, everything is ready for the ingoing summer, but that taste of the ephemeral and evanescent remains, as if we were wanting to grasp the summer but yet never being able to do so.
In this photo, is visible the contrast between the force of nature and the human effort to contain it in artificial spaces.