CECK THE COLOFON OF CITIES 16 AT DEDICATED PAGE

LIMINAL by Floriana Avellino

I live on the sidelines.

Georges Brassens, The Roads That Don't Lead to Rome,

In the Liminal project, Floriana Avellino constructs a visual reflection on urban space as a suspended, fragile and profoundly ambiguous territory. The city that emerges from these images is never completely defined: it is a place of crossings, waits and dissolves, in which the human presence seems to float in an intermediate dimension between reality and perception.

The author declares that she has "a constant fascination with liminal times and places" and this tension runs through the entire work. Street photography here becomes a tool for silent observation rather than direct documentation. It is not the event that is important, but what happens immediately before or immediately after; not the center of the action, but that emotional threshold where the meaning remains open and unstable.

Particularly interesting is the way in which Avellino uses elements typical of the urban environment — "the window, the reflection, the shadow or the simple act of waiting" — transforming them into narrative devices. Reflective surfaces, transparencies and partially concealed figures construct images full of visual ambiguity, where the boundary between inside and outside seems to continually dissolve.

The human presence often appears fragmented, blurred or incorporated into the architecture of the city itself. It is a choice consistent with the idea of telling what the author defines as "the invisible energy of the interlude": a mental space even before being physical, in which time slows down and the ordinary loses its practical function to open up to unexpected possibilities.

From an aesthetic point of view, Liminal dialogues with a tradition of the most contemplative and introspective urban photography, far from the search for shock or irony typical of certain contemporary street photography. The result is an elegant and layered work, capable of transforming the city into a suspended emotional landscape, where each image seems to hold an unfinished breath.

Sonia Pampuri