This project is a tribute to the poem “8 Moons” written by Sharon Olds. My goal is to stage a visual poem, independent from the text which is inspired by, and yet enriched by it, creating a connection between literature and photography.

After many years living in Spain (in Barcelona) and due to Covid situation I moved back to the northern part of Italy, where I was born, and settled down, for the first time in my life, in the countryside - rather than in a city. When I had started this series I wasn’t feeling really well: I felt a bit lonely, it wasn’t that easy to reconnect with my roots and I was very scared of the extreme weather conditions that we were experiencing in my area (storms, heavy winds, floods). My anxiety reached its peak when the Russo Ukrainian war started (at least to me) completely unexpectedly. I felt like I had lost all my certainties, I was very disoriented. When I feel like that, I often search for relief in art: I have the urge to look for artists who feel (or have felt) the same, first of all to achieve a sense of belonging, but also to compare my reactions with the ones of authors I admire.

In the last few years I have very often felt warmly accompanied in my life’s processes by the work of Sharon Olds, so it felt natural to call on her one more time.

I discovered her recent poem “8 Moons” online. It was the first time I was reading it and it immediately resonated.

I was very impressed by the verse that I chose as a title of my series - we can’t imagine the length of time it took to make the universe - because it sounded as a prayer, or a meditation. I found it moving and I wanted to “stay” on this concept, so I got the idea to pay a tribute to this poem using my language: photography.

I like to think that the search for beauty does not only respond to the need to escape reality when we find it unbearable, but on the contrary, it can also represent a sort of moral exercise. I find that the loss of awareness of beauty can only lead to a dangerous psychological state of dissociation and indifference. We need to feel that we belong - and that we belong to something beautiful, in order not to feel purposeless, and art is a powerful tool to remind us about it. When I realise that another human being feels the same as I feel and that she/he is able to communicate it with me no matter of the time and the geographical barriers, then I am not alone anymore.

An atom bomb—does it reduce everything
to atoms—to a mist the size of the moon?
And the hydrogen bomb—is there water in it?
When you drop it, does the mushroom above it
look like a splash, as if you’d dropped
the moon onto the ocean? If you dropped
the moon onto the Pacific, would the moon’s
circumference fit? Some say the equators of
8 moons dropped onto the surface
of the Pacific would fit on it.
We can’t imagine the length of time
it took to make the universe.
And the death of the Earth—for most of us,
unimaginable, and therefore
inevitable. As if each parent,
at the same moment, will see our offspring
atomized, our species’ clouds
lifting off the globe, the huge, childless atom.

Sharon Olds