Wuhan

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.” (Pablo Picasso)

Wuhan Tianhe International Airport

Wuhan Airport.

Reading the news is still a shock. The hand covers the lips and nose, like a mask, and the other hand holds the phone as if weighing the entity of the words she is reading.

Each of the three hostesses is hypnotized on the screen of the telephones, with grim and smileless faces of those who cannot eliminate the worry.

Three.

Three, like those who walk in the empty and deserted floor painted only with long shadows.

Normally so alive and loud with voices, announcements on the loudspeaker, languages and rubbing of suitcase wheels. Now only lines of shadows and the ticking of their shoe heels echoes in silence. Everything is quiet, as in a painting by De Chirico: the metaphysics of absence.

Three, like the two tired women who let themselves be overwhelmed by sleep, on the table of a fast food restaurant, in the food area on the upper floor, while the man behind them is intent on having a meal. It's difficult to sleep peacefully these days; everything turns upside down; at night the eyes remain wide open to stare at the ceiling and the day they close as soon as possible.

 

Three, like the girls who instead resist the silence and laugh, chat between the tables, because life inevitably goes on.

Three, like whoever must move and leave, sitting waiting for flight or on the way. In the empty rooms, beyond the glass like fish learning to understand the limits of their aquarium-world.

Three, like those who know that giving in to body inertia is the beginning of the end. 

We are in the world thanks to our body, not to the mind; we are perceptive beings who live in reality thanks to our senses. Therefore, regressing inwardly, forgetting the body, makes us all more fragile and deadly. We must always be able to feel our blood flowing through our veins. Now more than ever. Our inner vitality is the most effective antibody.

Wuhan. A city that will remain etched forever within us: engraved like Babylon, Ithaca, Alexandria, Troy.

These photographs speak of our present, of a future that we cannot understand how it will be. But are we really sure about this? 

In recent months, we have been bombarded with terrible images. Every day, from my friends in Asia, I get gruesome photographs of the dead gathered in Italy. Worried about me and my country. And we, they, trust the photos, because they are precisely photographs: faithful fragments of reality. But, they are almost all false. 

Like these photographs of Wuhan, so full of loneliness, fatigue, melancholy, worry. These are photographs that I took in December 2018. And not just in Wuhan airport, also in Guangzhou airport.

The coincidence is only in the mythical name of the city: Wuhan, which is now a Pavlovian reflection of fear for us. So, you read those pictures with me, you let my enchanting words bring you like cobra eyes, you catapult into them all your anxieties, as if they were fetishes of black magic. But it's not reality. I have deceived you.

In his merciless analysis of Photography, Roland Barthes, in his famous essay Camera Lucida, writes: 

    “Such is the Photograph: it cannot say what it lets us see."

    "In a certain photograph, I believe I perceive the lineaments of truth.”

But what truth? What we want to see or what it wants to show us?

It's not simply a matter of lying. I have not lied to you: the photographs are authentic, I only not tell you the year in which they were taken, speaking to a present that is that of reading the photos. I described them following the emotion of the moment.

Then, you believed in me, in my words, more than simply in the photographs. Because as shamans and psychoanalysis teach, giving a name to one's fears makes them controllable: it helps us heal.

This is why we rely so strongly on the power of images. But, be careful. Photographs are not reality. They are mirrors of a kaleidoscope, especially if combined with words. Don't be caught by them like fish in the net. Think. 

“The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed.” (Roland Barthes)

Roland Barthes: “La camera chiara – Note sulla fotografia” (Einaudi, 2003)

Italian Version