Catania Nuda (A Free-Dive into a City's Subconscious )

Do cities have an individual subconscious, like individual humans do? Some entomologists theorized that ant-houses or bee-hives hosting massive communities of social insects develop into an organism-like creature, sharing some fundamental features which we normally consider exclusive to their individual members. Could be cities of humans be the same? Could the infinite human lives they hosted, stratified through centuries, and the natural environment where they happened to be built grow into a mega-organism with a specific subconscious? I don't know. Catania Nuda was born as a photographic exploration of this question. For this journey I chose Catania, Sicily's second largest city, with over 400,000 inhabitants living in a very peculiar and defining place between the Jonian Sea and Europe's most active volcano, Mount Etna. The method I chose to investigate this elusive subject is to use a very physical and instinctive form of photography, ''throwing'' myself and my camera where I imagined it was easier to get lucky and catch a glimpse to the subconscious part of the soul of the city. I pushed into the waterfront area, normally hidden from view from the city due to its rugged, lavic terrain, and then crossed into the underwater exploring the sea, the constant companion of the city's inhabitants. I looked for answers ''diving'' in the colossal crowds that celebrate the city's Saint Girl, Agata, in a ferocious display of religious devotion, stunning in the hard and secular city. I climbed above 3000 meters on Mount Etna where swarms of people crowded the extreme landscape to catch a glimpse of the latest eruption. All these very different spheres of the city surprisingly talk to each other and draw the contours - even if faintly and partially - of what could be the city's subconscious. If Catania had a subconscious it would be a totally peculiar ''space'', an harmonious dance of opposites and contraries: beautiful and dark, cynical and devout, sensual and tragic, violent and generous, poor and sumptuous, sculpted by the sun lights and by the hardship of life. Ultimately, Catania Nuda is also a deeply personal quest for me. Catania is the city where I was born and grew up before leaving it at 15 years of age never to go back. Catania Nuda is for me also a way to re-trace the deepest and mysterious - but very real and concrete - elements that may have shaped my heart and contributed to how I live my life in the great Elsewhere.