Matteo Ribet, Altravista, 2023

Altravista is a visionary, disturbing, intimate project. The author, Matteo Ribet, at his first publishing experience, worked from an absence: blindness. This book, however, is not a work about being blind. The author starts from an extreme condition and declines it on a universal and symbolic level. A play between the visible and the invisible. It prompts us to question ourselves about how blind we can all be, all of us, in the face of diversity. How many realities that surround us we prefer not to see for fear of losing our certainties and security. Matteo Ribet, with Altravista, borrows the vision of a blind person and shows us a vague, dark, blurred world to help us reflect on our identity and our prejudices.

‘Light courts the dark – now reverberating, now alternating, now proximate – like Luis Borges’ fingertips on a visit to Palermo, caressing the mosaics of the Palazzo dei Normanni, when he came to collect the prize he himself had devised, a year before his death. While the Argentinean tried with his skin, for lack of anything else, to perceive the beauty of the Arab-Norman colonnade, other eyes discreetly surveyed the scene […]”
Antonio Ortoleva