Nicola Cazzullo is an Architecture & Landscape photographer born in Genova, currently based in Milan.

Nicola contacted to help him edit and styling his long-term photography project on the A10 motorway, which he wanted to publish as a book and on which he had worked since 2006: these places are the places where Nicola grew up and his pain and shock in the aftermath of the catastrophic collapse of the very same motorway’s Bridge in the heart of Genova city was something that would never leave him, as he told me when we first spoke.

My work was to show in the sequence of the book edit taken over more than 12 years the evolution “from an ethereal, futuristic vision of the A10 immersed in natural landscapes to an urban reality that suddenly appears overwhelming, dark, oppressive, claustrophobic” not just in Nicola’s eyes, but also in the astonished universal perception of this unfathomable tragedy.

I carefully sequenced the pictures following the words of Nicola’s poetic and introspective Intro text, which I edited as part of the work to fully convey the transition Nicola talks about, and I styled the pictures in a Polaroid, timeless B&W, so that the A10 could become a symbol, more than just a place seen in the news, of the fine balance between human will and arrogance.

This is the beautiful text Nicola wrote, I won’t cut any part of it, cause it truly deserves to be read entirely.

“In the fall of 2006, I decided to embark on a unique journey.

The trip took place exclusively in the western part of the city of Genoa, between the Cornigliano neighborhood and the Voltri conurbation; my sole focus was the structures of the bridges and overpasses of the A10 motorway, which have fascinated me since childhood.

Seen from below, and up close, they are imposing, gigantic structures, embedded in a rugged, rocky, and often barren geological formation.

Their presence influenced my photographic imagination, becoming part of my personal concept of landscape and territory, just like the morphological elements that nature chose to place in those places; in my vision, the presence of a concrete overpass had the same reason for existing as a mountain or a valley, an innate graft, made almost of the same material.

My project aimed to offer the viewer the same vision, a different approach to these subjects, who are easily perceived as inappropriate for depiction, and to restore to them the dignity often denied. The essentiality of the portrayed subject is stark and evident, like the bare reinforced concrete structure that composes it and gives it its form, and therefore its stable, perennial function.

A little over 10 years later, these images have returned to the forefront in a forceful, tragic way. The sudden collapse of the A10 bridge over the city of Genoa was a global, perhaps definitive, collapse in the sense of monolithic security we all had. A harsh wedge of doubt, anger, and fear crept in: the "function" had not held up, the legacy of the past, uncared for and unmaintained, no longer supports us.

My project, my very vision, was thus turned inside out, upside down: with profound sadness, both human and artistic, I saw a precise path unfold in my images: from an ethereal, futuristic vision of the A10 immersed in natural landscapes to an urban reality that suddenly appears overwhelming, dark, oppressive, claustrophobic.

This transition seems visible in the images, but it is also an internal one, not just logistical; perhaps it somewhat reflects the shift in our perception from an illusion of modernity to the nightmare of August 14th 2018 and a very sad awakening:

Forgetting renewal, care, humility, and respect for life, bridges, like buildings, warehouses, and any other architectural artifact, are nothing more than an entropic transition of matter from a precarious state of equilibrium to a state of quiet ruin. 
Leaving decay undisturbed, only the mountains remain to observe what remains on the ground.”