Iacopo Pasqui, Der Engel, 2024

We can never fully know a person, a place, or a story, however, if I were an angel, then I could listen to every single person, I could get to know you – at long last – I could understand you all; understand everything. Perhaps though, it’s in the mystery of in-comprehension, and of not knowing, where the magnitude of life resides. That incom- prehension that renders both the world and humans unpredictable, illogical, and full of vital, and at times explosive, energy. Maybe we don’t need to know the true inten- tion and nature of a beautiful gesture when something is just beautiful and that’s it. In fact, often it would be better not to seek out answers or explanations because this is what life is: sometimes authentic, sometimes fake; sated or miserable, overf lowing or empty. Wenders’ angels knew this all too well, so well they decided to become human.
They wanted to touch life with their own hands, to savour every tiny detail of what, before, was just the product of a sight that was real but sterile, like their own vision in black and white. The first time that I arrived in Łódź, it felt like I was in East Berlin, and, like the angels, in almost four years of brief but intense travels, I have collected the traces of what touched me. I was seeking photographs that were words; light, sparse, evanescent, evocative. Snapshots that illustrated not only my Polish present but also the present – and in a certain sense the past – of a place that made me feel like an angel, a place that made me feel at home.