Selva is a meditation on the entanglement of self and landscape. The work develops through an experimental darkroom process in which photographic paper is submerged in water with soil collected from Selva di Ferriere (Emilia-Romagna, Italy) and developer. Through repeated tests, I vary the intensity and direction of air blown across the water, creating ripples that move soil and chemistry across the paper and leave unpredictable traces on its surface.
Rather than using photography to represent the landscape, the process allows elements of the landscape to physically participate in forming the image. Water, soil, air, chemistry and photographic
paper become active materials, allowing the image to emerge through their interaction.
Darkroom experiments, 2024 (Ph. Kurt Lyons)
STAMPI DI CAMELIA (2025)
A series of lumen prints created by placing camellia flowers directly onto photographic paper and exposing them to light.
Through repeated experiments with exposure, placement, and organic matter, the process produces unpredictable variations in colour, form, and detail.
Light, time, the flowers, and the photosensitive surface become active participants, allowing the image to emerge through their interaction rather than through complete control.
Stampi di Camelia, 2025, 200 x 100 cm
GREIF (2025)
Grief is a collaborative, performative artist book of 60 pages, encased in a reclaimed sweet chestnut trunk.
Contrary to the principles of traditional publishing, Grief resists portability and mass distribution, it is intentionally weighty, difficult to open without assistance, and demands a collective, physical encounter.
The work emerged from a shared need to give form to ecological grief and climate anxiety, by making a book that feels like a ritual, an encounter, a confrontation. Rather than circulating through bookstores or libraries, Grief disseminates through presence and conversation. Its awkward size and raw materiality invite people to come together, to sit with its heaviness and read aloud, to hold its weight both physically and emotionally.
In this way, the book becomes a performative gesture, a site for gathering, mourning, and dialogue, where the act of reading is no longer private but shared. Its dissemination lives not in numbers or reprints, but in the moments it creates between people.
Book design & production: José Cárdenas, Anna Laura SchiaviYihan Pan, José Cárdenas, Yihao Zhao & Anna Laura Schiavi
ON DEATH: A DANCE (2026)
On Death: A Dance deconstructs an original 8mm film into individual photographic frames, transforming moving images into a sequence of still fragments. By isolating and recontextualising the film, the work shifts attention from narrative to gesture, rhythm and materiality, allowing each frame to exist as an image in its own right.
The project reflects on how death is most often encountered through mediated images: news broadcasts, social media and the continuous circulation of distant tragedies. Rather than reproducing this spectacle, the work brings mortality back to the scale of personal experience. The body, movement and physical presence become a way of approaching death through intimacy rather than distance, inviting a quieter encounter with something that accompanies everyday life.