“a particular time was long while it was present, because in so far as it was present, it was long. For it had not yet passed away and so become non-existent; therefore it was still something, and therefore capable of being long: though once it passed away, it ceased to be long by ceasing to be”. [..]“it is not the things themselves that are brought forth from our memory - for these have passed away: but words conceived from the images of the things: for the things stamped the prints upon the mind as they passed through it by way of the senses. Thus for example my boyhood, which no longer exists, is in time past, which no longer exists; but the likeness of my boyhood, when I recall it and talk of it, I look upon in time present, because it is still present in my memory [..]”*
The research for atmosfera - Nature or Nurture? To-morrow is frozen down on the plain, is all based on time which has passed, a past of ancestors in which to seek traces to form a ‘now’ which offers the key to the self, to the person’s identity. Past time is put under examination, to paraphrase it and maintain it alive and connected. Discover oneself by probing into past stories to light upon which parts of us coincide or differentiate from them. Nature or Nurture?: given places. Nature, given untouched in its primordial being, our nature. Nurture, culture, education, background. What in us is ‘only’ ours and what is a continuation of past stories and experiences? From what antiquity does our ‘seeing’ come from? What parts of our being are heritages which will continue to co-exist in us?
Nature and nurture are circumscribed scenarios in which our life has taken place. This research has its roots in the past but lives in the present moment without being bound by the future: to-morrow is frozen down on the plain.** A hypothetical investigation which doesn’t foresee an exhaustive conclusion, but just the assumption of being able to deepen one’s own knowledge by exploring the more intimate hemisphere: places of feeling. Opening oneself to perceptions transforms these co-ordinateless places into images. These images take on form through the simple act represented by walking or movement. Experiencing these sensations – these are extremely precious occasions - generates a relationship between the subject (me, storyteller or photographer) and the object (place, element or person). This relationship generates an atmosphere.
As Gernot Bohme wrote (in Atmosphere, ecstasy, staged. Esthetics as a general theory of perception)“perception should be […] conceived as an emotional situation […]: the self and the thing, or the subject and the object seeing that they are perceptively connected in a state of co-existence. [...] the primary perceptive object is the atmosphere. […] The atmospheres are evidently neither moods of the subject nor qualities of the object […] They are something between the subject and object which is not relational but the relationship itself”. The atmosphere can be something which is instilled in us (being subjects able to perceive-live the relationship) or something unique, our own, regardless of what came before us.
* Saint Augustine, Confessions, Sheed & Ward, New York, 1959, book eleven
** Cesare Pavese, Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi, Einaudi, Torino, 2020, taken from the poem To C. from C.
