La Componente Magica 2024
Four years ago I began documenting Mount Etna with a logical, scientific approach. My intention was to photograph it at different altitudes and catalogue the flora that lived there. After four years, my gaze began to linger on aspects I had never explored before. My photographs were taking on a new form; the landscape in front of me was transforming and its scenery revealed new possibilities, while I was changing, growing and gaining a new awareness. I reached the summit of the volcano and, I don’t remember how, I ended up inside it. I sailed through deep space among planets and galaxies; I watched the beauty of matter take shape before my eyes, its play of colour and its ever-changing form. “La Componente Magica” (The Magic Component) is the metaphor for a journey I keep undertaking in the study of landscape, of matter and of myself. It is a work inspired by stories such as “The Little Prince” and Munari’s “Fantasia”. By pairing images and texts, I train myself to play with imagination, envisioning worlds, guardians, adventures and undefined spaces, and composing the visual story of an interplanetary journey. In this research, contemplating the landscape has become a profound act of connection with the earth: a journey into matter and into myself. By observing the landscape with imagination and envisioning worlds and adventures, I have tried to build a visual narrative that mirrors an inner one. Can we still, even as adults, reflect through play?
Published in the exhibition catalogue Solo che amore ti colpisca (2026), RISO – Palermo
«Danilo Currò (Messina, 1993; lives in Rome) takes a journey through the unspoilt landscapes of Etna with La componente magica (2024). Turned into unreal, expanded spaces, these Etnean notes draw a personal cosmology that combines science fiction, play and geographic exploration, pushing the micro towards the macro and vice versa: mountains that become galaxies, craters like black holes, crystalline stones like planets and stars. From the leaden blacks of volcanoes, solfataras and rocky ground, to a multicoloured collection of mineral specimens, quite like celestial bodies floating among galaxies, displayed here as the objects of an anomalous collection. The experience of the sublime before the volcano becomes the possibility of losing oneself and of gaining access to the unfathomable.»
Text by Helga Marsala, p. 96 (translated from the Italian)
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