Nuove Arene

Around athletic effort everything changes without changing, Massimiliano Camellini’s photo project explains

What emerges from the darkness of a modern arena? A moment of individual transfiguration, a collective sharing session. Ancient materials for new tools of play. Worked wood that touches small black spheres, that caresses them, that accompanies them first gently, then violently, to a promised land of crossed cotton and passing joys.

The photographic film is imprinted with muscular and emotional tensions, with bodies floating silently on noisy wheels, filling them with force and speed. They are soft and circular movements, direct and violent. They are shadows of past and present actions, of feats and failures that return and return, here and everywhere, like cyclical purifying performances. Shot after shot, today’s gladiators cross their masses, their sticks, their visions, eventually generating timeless, faceless duels.

What emerges from the darkness of a modern arena? A personal challenge that has never stopped taking shape, that will never stop doing so. From the blood-streaked sands and sword clangs of ancient Rome, to field hockey frescoed in an anonymous provincial arena, through an endless spectrum of efforts, challenges, goals. Each time a new introduction. Each time a new epilogue. Waiting for the near or distant future, waiting for a new arena to inhabit.