Tommaso Bonaventura, Alessandro Imbriaco, Fabio Severo, La Teoria del Vuoto, 2024

La Teoria del Vuoto stems from a photograph showing a scene of daily life in Buccinasco, in the province of Milan. In that suburban quiet years ago, weapons were found, hidden or abandoned by unknown people. From that find takes shape a network of episodes, places and people that expands throughout Italy, trickling down to Platì, a small town near Reggio Calabria whose history for decades has been linked to that of Buccinasco.

The photograph comes from Corpi di Reato. A visual archeology of mafia phenomena in contemporary Italy, a photographic project by Bonaventura, Imbriaco and Severo first presented in 2012. Corpi di Reato explores the Italian territory in search of the signs left by mafias on the landscape, confronting the invisibility of this widespread and changing presence, which has gone from the violence of massacres to a silent infiltration. La Teoria del Vuoto takes up this research to take it in new directions, where the center of reflection becomes a questioning of how photography can continue to narrate and document today.

The void serves as a metaphor for the expansion methods of organized crime: void can be understood as the permeability of territories unprepared for the criminal threat, the ease with which clans establish themselves; a void is also what they carve out in the social fabric, eroding legality. Lastly, the void also reflects the gap between the surface image and the deeper reality of places like Buccinasco and Platì: the former appears to be an orderly town in Northern Italy, while the latter is a hidden stronghold in the Aspromonte mountains.