Midbar. The desert.

A recurring theme in my travels and in my photographs. It is a fascinating subject, a mine of ancestral references that beckons me to various parts of the world in a creative quest for knowledge, as endless a source of inspiration as the meanings variously attributed to it throughout the history of man.

In the ancient world, for example, the desert was not simply an area devoid of water and vegetation, and therefore uninhabited; it was known as a devastated land, abandoned by humans whose violent or desperate traces, however, live on indelibly.

The desert as a space, but a space for listening to the mysterious echo of our Being alive, rather than an architectural space. The perception of an existence that rises above the shackles that tether us to the daily patterns and limitations of living in a Western-type society, in which we see ourselves only through an understanding and rationalization of the effects of our sensorial interaction with the objectival world. We need to open our eyes to a place of broad horizons, a sort of desert conceived as a natural place of total isolation, far removed from any kind of stimulus induced by cohabitation with other beings. Our innermost feelings become amplified. A quintessentially mystical place, Midbar – the desert – the Hebrew word for desert has the same roots as the word Medaber, and therefore not a desert in the sense of desolation or silence, but a place of revelations, an ideal place for listening to the Word, Nature, the Spirit.

But also the desert as an empty place, free from the constraints of history and geography, memory and matter, and therefore free to take on all the shapes that exist in the world – free from the market in particular. A liquid place, made simply of sand, ice or rock, and thus swift to take on any and every possible form.

The images are therefore personal visions, pictures of unique desert land reinterpreted in the light of what I have come to know about it.