Il suo buio speciale by Mattia Balsamini and Pietro Minto

Rhetorik Serif by Sascha Bente in use by Federico Barbon for the photography and conversation book Il suo buio speciale (“Its Special Darkness”).

Through thirteen landscape photographs, thirteen individual portraits and thirteen conversations, Mattia Balsamini and Pietro Minto embark on a journey of research into the identity of northeastern Italy, a territory that has undergone a profound cultural and social transformation in the last fifty years.

Il suo buio speciale is a collaborative project: born during the residency at Villa Filanda Antonini, the book maps an anthropogeographical landscape through images, faces and words of thirteen distinguished Venetians who have distinguished themselves in the arts and sciences. The portraits and landscapes photographed by Balsamini become, alongside Minto’s words, a tool through which to enter into dialogue with the territory and tell the story of a place that has always been characterized by the competitive logic of making, of producing, and that today, having exhausted the possibilities of exploiting only material resources, must transform sweated labor into another kind of commitment, giving new and legitimate dignity to “thinking.”