My installation stems from a reflection on the mythological figure of Ino who becomes Leukothea by falling into the sea. Known as the white Goddess of the sea foam and of the aurora, she helps the shipwrecked Ulysses by giving him a white veil and begs him to return it to her by throwing it into the sea. Leukothea myth leads to discover a creative and active feminine and conveys the ideas of both destruction, annihilation and drowning, but also of eternal rebirth and creation through the cycle of the sea waves. Her veil symbolizes the possibilities of renowned discoveries and unveilings, while the white color – from which her name has origin – is a symbol of regeneration and feminine, found in many Mediterranean cultures. Inspired by this myth, I focused my visual work on the contact with the sea water and on the plastic gesture of the unveiling, by reflecting on its meaning in photography. From a perceptual point of view, the white color is formed inside the visible light spectrum, but it’s connected to an apparent absence of images. In order to investigate this idea, I painted several photographic prints using a white hydrochromic color which becomes translucent in water: thanks to a photographic revelation process through sea water, the images I manipulate on the shore gradually reveal themselves to the eyes of the viewers. In this way I reflect upon the nature of physis, as Heraclitus states in his fragment (Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ: Physis kryptesthai philei, Nature loves to hide), i.e. nature in its ultimate essence as well as the way in which the same nature manifests itself to us. I eventually question the meaning of the image and the nature of contemporary visual processes whose complexity often tends to be concealed by visual redundancy: a phenomenon that often blinds us to the world's most subtle dynamics and complex identities in transformation.

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