«What should I use my eyes for? To look at what?» This is the question Monica Vitti asks herself in Antonioni’s movie Red Desert, in her role as the neglected wife of an industrial manager, as she becomes alienated from the world around her, which gets increasingly dehumanized. She walks unsteadily, as if on the verge of suicide, almost as if she wanted to burden herself with the destiny of a whole country, an Italy that has chosen to leave behind war and defeat, and join the race for industrial development, which is going to change the face of the country. 

Half a century later, Gianluca Gamberini seems to echo her thoughts in his photographs. ‘Naturae Humanae’ is a project about the landscape, the nature in particular, produced by the kind of industrial modernism that Antonioni, as a director, already seemed to expose very early on, at the beginning of the 1960s. The photographer looks at traces and signs left on the ground, like scars on a huge patch of skin. It is almost as if, in order to forget a war, Italians chose to fight another one, against themselves and their past guilt feelings. Gamberini reflects on the results of this. There is no annoyed reaction on his part, only detachment. And not everything seems to be lost. There is still room for something.

«You wonder what to look at. I wonder how to live.» This is Richard Harris’s answer to the protagonist, who is suffering under an increasing desertification of meaning. The real question is whether we know ourselves enough to know what we want. So Gamberini, in deliberately taking a stance towards what he sees – a consumed society, more than a consumer society, seems to call into question the values of a useless life, spent in looking without seeing. 

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LINKS 
Gianluca Gamberini 
Italy