What Returns
Artist Name
LIVI Lidiana Ceruti & Vincenzo Marino
Artist Statement
Lidiana Ceruti and Vincenzo Marino are photographers united by a passion for landscape and its ability to evoke emotion. Their research focuses primarily on aquatic landscapes, wetlands and la-goon environments, explored through light, reflections and colour. Many of their photographs are subsequently transformed into cyanotypes, an early photographic process that allows them to su-spend time and create a dialogue between contemporary photography and the memory of the past.
Yet the transition from photograph to cyanotype is not simply a matter of reproduction. It is a new creative act, shaped by patience, craftsmanship and experimentation. The surface is prepared by hand, exposed to light, then washed and transformed through processes that leave room for the unexpected. Even subtle variations in gesture, light, paper or timing can influence the final result.
It is precisely this handcrafted dimension that makes each work unique and unrepeatable. The cha-racteristic blue of the cyanotype can be further transformed through toning processes, including the use of natural and environmentally conscious substances, capable of introducing unexpected shades, nuances and atmospheres. The photograph thus becomes a living material—an image that is not sim-ply printed, but slowly constructed.
The result preserves the memory of the landscape that was photographed, but also the memory of the gesture through which it was transformed. Each cyanotype therefore tells two stories: that of the ga
Exhibition Statement
The series emerges from an observation of Comacchio and its profound relationship with water, a territory where human presence has always been shaped by the need to inhabit, cross and transform the lagoon. Canals, bridges, posts, houses and structures appear as traces of a history embedded in the landscape. Yet the human figure is absent. What remains are its traces, suspended in a rarefied atmosphere, while water and vegetation seem to be slowly reclaiming the space.
The twelve works form a journey from presence to absence, from intervention to dissolution, from abandonment to reclamation. They do not simply describe a disappearance, but observe a slow pro-cess in which what was built gradually loses its function and becomes part of the landscape’s memo-ry.
Mist, reflections and water make boundaries uncertain. Architecture becomes silhouette, paths fade away, and structures emerge like remnants of a distant presence. Photography does not merely do-cument this transformation; it shifts it into a suspended dimension, where time appears to slow down.
The choice of cyanotype reinforces this sensation. The tactile and unrepeatable nature of the print, together with the handmade process and subsequent transformations, moves the image beyond sim-ple representation, turning it into an object, a memory and an interpretation.
The journey ends with the idea of “return”: not the erasure of humanity, but its gradual dissolution into the landscape. What remains is a new and undefined pla