Cuba, 2016.

In February 2016 I visited Cuba with the intent to fix that special place in my heart before the upcoming invasion of capitalism will change it forever. While being there I turned some of my impressions into images.

See the full series on my portfolio website.


A trip to Cuba

This project tells of a piece of world whose roots lie in my childhood spent in Sicily, the place where I was born. It’s about one of the most precarious categories of workers who try to survive every day by making a living without certainty of tomorrow. They are street vendors, farm hands, smiths, and other small artisans and workers who still represent an important working class, particularly in South Italy, that is largely affected by the current crisis and in general by the globalisation.

But this series is above all a tribute to the most common means of transport of these workers, a characteristic vehicle that is part of the Italian tradition, and that is slowly disappearing: the “Ape Piaggio” (Bee). The Bee is a three-wheeled cheap, minimal and versatile means. Basically it is a motorcycle equipped with a small cabin and a loading platform to be suitable for all kinds of small transports. My childhood memories are still inhabited by the images of these small vehicles buzzing all around the streets of Sicilian cities and villages.

Using a language in between documentary and portraiture, through a series of triptychs I try to evocatively depict the special relationship that establishes between the Bees and their owners, a relationship that often lasts a lifetime.
The images of the polyhedral cabins indirectly tell the stories of their owners, even more than the portraits themselves do. Faded, rusted and lived up to be literally consumed, the Bees represent the fascinating symbol of a working class that still resists and fights for its own survival.

The project, entirely done on film with a 6x6 medium format camera, is still on-going and hopefully will end up with a book.

Bee Generation

Palermo (Sicily), July 2010, time of the religious festival dedicated to the patron saint of the city: Santa Rosalia ("u fistinu"). A careful tour around the most significant neighborhoods reveals the great faith and the strong devotion of the people towards the patron saint. Improvised altars of saints, candles, flowers, pictures of deceased relatives appear everywhere, in the most unlikely places, and silently live together with the daily events of the Palermitans, blending within and “disappearing” in the background of this wonderful theater of life, full of loud sounds, smells and tastes that arouse strong emotions.

As a Sicilian, I know myself how faith conditions any aspect of our lives; "The Sacred and the Profane", in fact, tries to communicate, through the metaphor of of images, how the historical roots and traditions are so far in time that today we can see a curious and sometime grotesque mix of worship objects and symbols with everyday life.

The Sacred and the Profane

A research on the essence of life which is inspired by the organism 'Tree', observed
both as a single and as a representative of an entire species. The visual fusion of
individuals, through superimposition, reinforces the universal and fades out the
particular, leading us to a higher level of thought. The eternal value of mortal life lies
in repetition of individual's uniqueness, which let alone would have no hope. As titled
by the famous Sicilian writer Luigi Pirandello in one of his most famous work, we are
all one, no one and one hundred thousand.

One, No One and One Hundred Thousand

This project focuses on the concept of “vacancy” as an increasingly rare subject to find in our chaotic contemporary cities. Something that still has the power to make us feel uncomfortable, with the urge to fill it with things, colors and “signs”. Indeed our minds are no longer accustomed to the absence of messages. And even the vacuum itself, like a black hole, yearns to be filled in by attracting everything in its range with some sort of magnetic energy.

Here in Berlin I feel this kind of “vacancy” each time I find myself in one of its many “non-places”. Forgotten empty spaces overcome by dull blind buildings, whose white walls resemble giant sheets waiting to be filled in, to become part of the “whole”. Those surfaces seem to glow in the bright sunlight like enchanting alien monoliths, making us loose the sense of meanings.

For this project I decided to make use of the analog pinhole photography on large format film. I did this for a series of reasons, the most important ones being the need to take my time with those places and the desire to make the emulsion itself “breathe” the atmosphere through the direct contact with the outside air. Moreover, the inherent softness and strong vignetting of the pinhole photography contribute to enhancing the glowing light I described above.

The project is still ongoing.

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Marco Ristuccia