IN NOMINE LUCIS

Fireworks emerge from distant villages.
They are sacrificed to the darkness.

I spent my childhood in a small town in central-southern Italy: liturgical calendar, pagan life. During the processions, we walked through the streets of the historic center holding a candle in our hands. A plastic cylinder around it protected the flame from the wind and stained the stones with sanguine hues. — I remember tilting the candle so the flame would soften the plastic, turning it into malleable lava. Attempting to sculpt shadows. —
Within those rituals, woven from archaic gestures, the stratigraphies of past lives emerged.

Later, the sacred and the profane unraveled. With the decline of religion, we also allowed those arches that brought us closer to the divine to collapse. And we were left alone, clinging to the rational gaze, forgetting that beyond the intelligible lie the vast architectures of the invisible. Perhaps, then, we must ask ourselves whether it is wise to turn away from what refuses to be seen.

In an attempt to approach it, I propose narrowing our eyes. Seeking peripheral vision in order to inhabit the threshold between the visible and the invisible. This may lead us along two paths: one inward, where the gaze encounters the spirit; the other toward a beyond, where spirits move.

Spiritus, in Latin, means breath. Within its meaning persists the idea that the invisible resonates inside us, like an echo in the wind. And it is up to us to