On the occasion of the European Photography Festival 2022 , dedicated to the theme " an invincible summer " - taken from "Return to Tipasa" by Albert Camus, a hymn to the ability to resist adversity and to the creation of new reactions and considerations on human existence - Collezione Maramotti presents Bellum , a new artistic project commissioned to Carlo Valsecchi.

Bellum tells the ancestral conflict between man and nature and between man and man; the use of nature as a defense from the other man and likewise the defense of man from nature. With the mountain as its symbolic representation - extreme natural expression and at the same time place of the last war of position - the project originates from an exploration of the territories and fortified buildings of the Italian north-east linked to the First World War, one of the last moments in the history of Western humanity in which the destiny and experience of man were closely connected to the natural environment, its conformation, its laws and its control. What remains of that landscape of a century ago? What are the traces of the pact that humanity had made, in that historical moment, with nature?

Through a work that lasted about three years, Valsecchi traveled those mountains with his optical bench, from winter to spring he listened to those places to look out over the abyss of a blind conflict, sublimating in his shots a raw reality in often abstract form, intimately aesthetic and absolute in its essence. Bellum 's images become glimpses, portals made of light and composition, suspended in an endless time between silence, isolation and waiting.