When I met Angela Pietribiasi and saw her work for the first time, she introduced me to a very wide range of photo projects. We talked about an hour on the possibilities of development that her stories could have, which were there floating on the table among hopes, ideas and stories. In those moments, we tried to understand each other and find points of contact around her path. At the end of our meeting, as often happens when photographers share their work, I took with me in my memory drawers an image that is now part of this book and that is the real reason why I decided to write this text and to be a small part of this beautiful adventure. “To bring yourself some pictures home” means keeping those aside in your mind, asking yourself questions about the choices that led to their existences and even never being able to give meaningful answers. Despite this, those images remain there, they float in a suspended time in a not too obscure corner of our knowledge. They re-emerge when you least expect and ask questions and reflections that are usually personal, intimate and private. Over the time, then, they lose details but are never completely erased.
This happens not only with Angela’s works but with those of many other photographers and in general with many other images that are not necessarily photographs. The ability of latent permanence is one of the most fascinating, profound and mysterious aspects of the Image itself, ment as a language and as a form of communication.
Latency as an existential condition is the subject of Angela’s work. Something that has not yet manifested itself, that never takes definite shape but lives in suspension. We face a project that questions itself about the original beauty of primary elements, about imprisoned particles of light that takes light-years to hit the earth after leaving distant stars. On the absolute suspension as a status of humanity on this planet and on the primordial amazement, that derives from experiences that began outside our earth and have found a perfect home in this world. Just think about the origin of rocks or water that came to this world over billions of years brought by comet stars. Flipping through the pages of the book you get lost in the wonder of nature and its elements, you move in places that live in a permanent condition of expectation, the light is set to zero isolating the subjects to make them eternal and fragile. In this continuous exchange between eternity and fragility there is the most important moment of the book: everything that just a few decades ago seemed eternal to us, the world that surrounds us, now appears fragile and we fear its imminent end. Our feeling of chronic insecurity arises from a lack of confidence in the future. A future compromised by mankind’s action on the planet itself. The environment in which we live is comparable to the walls of the house where we were born and raised, as if they were no longer a haven but an uncertain place without any strength to protect us exposing ourselves to the dangers of the unknown. We feel the terror of no longer having our own space, we are sure, our children are terrified and meanwhile I am writing I think mockingly of the famous French comic Asterix and Obelix, the Gauls protagonists from the genius of Uderzo and Goscinny, they only feared that the sky could fall on their heads.
The legacy of the Anthropocene is the fear of no longer having a ground to walk on.
This unprecedented feeling is called solastalgia and is the most effective state of mind to describe the suspension and latency that the author tells in Anniluce.
Looking at Angela’s landscapes, it is not possible to define whether they are terrestrial or extraterrestrial, the snow, the ice look like lunar soil or images that some NASA’s space probe sends us back from distant worlds. Icebergs float between black seas and skies out of time and space, creating disorientation and uncertainty. Only the beauty of nature itself gratifies us and fills our eyes, leaving us with a sense of hope, a feeling that mankind cannot afford to lose. In the images where the human condition blends with natural elements, beloved to the author, there is the moment of reunion between humanity and its environment.
When the pages are about to end, Anniluce leaves us frightened in front of that definitive loss that is the environment as we get used to seeing it. The author’s message manifests itself in all its clarity: we are passing through, the earth will outlive us and its beauty, which is part of an interconnected infinity that is incomprehensible and indecipherable to us, is the only aspect that we can perceive from our anthropocentric point of view.

Antonio Carloni

Angela Pietribiasi is an artist with multiple potential artistic languages – painting, video art, installations. However, for expressing reflections and feelings triggered by the Anthropocene, the geological age that we are living through, she finds her ideal medium in photography. Her photographs, extremely rigorous from a formal point of view, illustrate, with sometimes minimal, often discarded presences, a world adrift, filtered by solitude while aspiring to the infinite. Clearness, emptiness, suspension, longing for a desired and unknown elsewhere waft through these images. “I’m interested in the image that arrives like a waiting, a silence, an infinite, a solitude”, Pietribiasi says. The artist confronts issues of nature and the environment with an unprecedented and intimate approach, giving us works that transcend simple documentary reportage. For this reason, they are beyond a definite time and place. I think about the recent nighttime images of shining icebergs floating on a black sea comparable to the almost invisible human figure, revealed by a reflection of moonlight and swallowed up by the sea’s immensity and infinite darkness. Powerful, pure, and desolate images, traversed by poetry and beauty. They connect with the 2004 “Corpi celesti” (“Celestial bodies”) cycle, which was developed later so that we are the “bodies”, understood as complex universes wandering through space. The theme extends to a collection of poetry, as with other examples like “Da qualche parte lontano” (“Somewhere far away” – 2013). Poetry then, the written line, supplements and underlines Angela’s visual research, highlighting an expressive intensity that finds an outlet in various linguistic forms. One of the most evocative cycles in recent years is “Paralleli, Interferenze, sparizioni” (“Parallels, interferences, disappearances”). Consisting of diptychs of highly sophisticated images in dialogue, they present curious formal analogies, with, however, clashing meanings and underlying, thoughtful cues that provoke reflection. Formal similarity, but semantic divergence. The intention is, the artist says, to give a face and a voice to that part of the visible that is least clear.

Maria Campitelli

Within the contemporary art panorama, Angela Pietribiasi conducts an intimist and unique subjective study. The author favors abandoned areas, rundown neighborhoods, forgotten places. In her wanderings, through her poetic vision, she explores sites of industrial archeology, grasping an implied and metaphysical beauty of abandoned industrial buildings, ex-building sites or other scenarios of abandoned work, cloaked in silence within the summer twilights. With the natural light of the precise instant, she attempts to immortalize something else, waiting areas, laden with underlying social problems, by placing different subjects in relation to one another. Some of the images seem like they are painted; they recall Mario Sironi’s urban landscapes, Carlo Carra’s colors, Giorgio De Chirico’s metaphysical views, the light of Felice Casorati and Edward Hopper and other painters from Margherita Sarfatti’s group from the 1900s (let us not forget that the artist started out as a painter). Her crumbled walls, the windows, the closed doors, the dilapidated gutters, ladders, pails and tools forgotten on the building sites and other fragments of time, seen like evanescent specters of human presences.
These and other photographic testimonies of time and space “write” a subjective visual diary in which each detail becomes an outline, a find, a sign, a memory. Images that are presupposed to immortalize the process of change in society, cause and effect of industrial urbanization that modifies our behavior, habits and values.
Her insidious metaphysical and silent “reportage” of contemporary landscapes, as waiting areas for suggestive magic realism, actually denounce environmental emergencies, marginalization, immigration, cultural differences and, in particular, bring up bitter reflections on the annihilation of the individual, engulfed by solitude in the global era, without describing it, through evocative and symbolic images. In her photographs, the landscape and the city fuse together into a single image, bathed by natural light. Her themes are: the metaphysical of the ordinary, time, space, loss of identity and of our memory. Time passed, immobile, time that consumes things and especially that which inexorably flees, is the key to understanding her photographs which hover between reality and vision, filtered by a pictorial sensitivity and her interior language. Through apparently silent and reassuring photographs, which are never didactic, where everything seems calm and harmonious, including the elements of chaos, the spectator is invited to reflect upon the inhuman condition, and actually “yell” at the decline of our hyper-modern civilization, by presenting different subjects in which nature, social and industrial history intertwine within the scenarios of doubt, where photography is an artifice which blends into the illusion and becomes a pretext, a visual and educating experience.

Jacqueline Ceresoli

Talking about Angela Pietribiasi’s work requires a subtle distinction: The ideological and conceptual intentions on one side, and the forms they take on by displaying themselves in photographic images. You could object that that subsists – even if, we know very well, the subtle distinction is theoretical, as works of art are realized in the synthesis of both points- in any artistic expression: form and content. But to say that in Angela Pietribiasi the two sides oppose each other in some way, in the sense of an opposition between the dramatic urgency of the contents and the tapered rigor of the visual choices, the rarified solution of the images steeped with poetry which tend to transmit intense convictions with the extreme purification of the means used. This is obviously to the photographer’s/artist’s advantage, being able to translate the meaningfulness of the idea, leading her to compose them into, at times almost abstract, images.
Angela says all of this with a series of diptychs which she has called ‘Parallels, Interferences, Disappearances’, where two different images are in some way connected.
The two white plates on white, an emptiness; the other filled with tiny, metallic crosses in their immaculate, formal perfection, demonstrate an absence and, with the crosses, a metaphoric sacrifice, carried out somewhere to satisfy our needs.
It’s a reflection that stems from the images, falling back onto acquired practices and aim at urging a change. Even here, we are struck by the extreme reduction of visual presences, by the constituent cleansing and by the poetic sense that comes from it. And the examples pile up. There’s the oil tanker emitting an excessive volume of hazardous smoke on the horizon of a sparkling sea placed beside the image of a sea bird all intent on investigating a rusty basin, the testimony of a decaying environment (Angela worked a lot on abandoned sites) which recalls seagulls weighed down with petrol. Or the beached whale and, conversely, the sunken ship, that is, two beings dead because of antithetic causes: the man by drowning and the animal by having remained out of the water. So, here are the parallels, interferences, disappearances the photographer/artist is looking for in her observation of the real and the man-environment relationship in which Angela Pietribiasi’s precious investigation takes place.

Maria Campitelli