Page 61 - Mediterraneo e dintorni - Maggio 2020

Bambino Masai - Kenya

Anziano - Palermo of the world: from India to China, from Cappadocia to Kenya,
from Hong Kong to Santo Domingo, in a period which runs
from 2015 to 2019. Ferraina comes from a family of artists, and
Nannipieri reminds us of this in the preface to “Human islands”
when he explains: “Ferraina having absorbed like a sponge,
from an early age, the expertise, the times, the technicalities,
the practices, the uses that his father, and before him his
grandfather, put in place every day (...) he knows well that one
of the “shamanic” powers of photography is also and above
all that of creating the real, not simply, flatly, documenting it
». And today, his work, in this sense, takes on a new value full
of paradigmatic meaning: what is isolation for individuals?
What is isolation for society? The answer is that captured by
his shots, sometimes as a cage, or refuge, or marginalization,
cliché, constraint, choice, or ... who knows how else we could
define this condition at the present time of social isolation from
Covid-19. In the small part of his archive kept in the precious
chest that is “Human islands”, Paolo captures - says Nannipieri -
“the exact moment - and here is his talent - in which man seems
hopelessly dispersed and separated from the others, he has not
fear of showing photographic art for what it is intimately: a
ruthless machine for reflection on the human».

Giornalaia - Hong Kong