CECK THE COLOFON OF CITIES 16 AT DEDICATED PAGE

"The Night Does Not Exist" by Massimiliano Meroni

The night is the taciturn dictionary of possible sounds, and the gloomy catalog of possible lights.

 Giorgio Manganelli

In the Anthropocene era, the artificial reconfiguration of the landscape has eroded the very separation between light and shadow. Massimiliano  Meroni's project La notte non esiste was born from a deep bond with Milan and from a disturbing observation: "over the years we have increasingly illuminated cities, streets, buildings, monuments to the point that the earth at night, seen from space, is bright". What was once an intimate experience of infinity, when "even from the backyard it was possible to see an infinite amount of stars", has turned into the systematic erasure of the night sky.

Meroni translates this ecological and philosophical reflection through a refined conceptual expedient, declaring an explicit formal debt to Surrealism: "Taking his cue from Magritte's series of nocturnal landscapes "The Empire of Lights", here is a series of surreal nocturnal views of the city of Milan where a daytime sky is superimposed on the urban landscape".

The photographic operation reveals an unsettling paradox. The light pollution of the metropolis is so pervasive that the visual short-circuit is almost normalized: "the lighting of the city is such that even a daytime sky can approach the subject without seeming 'wrong'". Meroni's urban photography thus becomes a severe but poetic indictment: the absence of darkness is now our alienating normality.

Sonia Pampuri