Beyond climbing and within our dreams. The visions of Claudio Piscina

Experiments carried out by Claudio Piscina, the photographer with years of both climbing and photography experience, have resulted in this series of visionary images which search for a "different" world which goes beyond a mere documentation of reality to explores that point where reality meets the imagination and gives birth to new visions.

The large collection of images is entitled Vision and this reflects perfectly what Claudio has attempted to communicate. But it is in the section "White Rabbit" that this takes on a new form of life; long months of work and experimenting with digital collage, initiated previously, culminate here.

White rabbit stems from the concept of that white rabbit which, as a symbol of that transition from concrete daily "doing and undoing", leads us into a magical world with moments of unreality in which the white rabbit is the aim to be reached so as to understand human beings and analyse their drive. The photo collage and post-production underline the bond between real climbing gestures and their derivatives in an unreal world where stories, dreams and ideas intertwine.

This is something unreal, like the one narrated in Alice in Wonderland, where the upside-down world shows us - in a metaphoric but decisive manner - the problems and dynamics of this world.

The different elaboration and post-production works are truly noteworthy and demonstrate the expressive power of a vision, of a desire to go beyond mere post-production. This is driven by a desire to explore much more than a simple retouched photograph, leaving the evident trace of this work, just like the Tornado or the Genius.

These images do not wish to represent reality since this is no longer of interest to these photos which, freed from the shackles of faithfully representing the world thanks to digital technology, allow for an exploration of those emotions hidden beyond (and within) climbing. Beyond its pulsation, within our fears and dreams. In doing so this transforms into a journey through our mental universe and manages to touch upon a visual elaboration of pulsation, often discharged in climbing.

Or perhaps, climbing and its degerneations and derivations are nothing but a pretext to talk about that world, more of less hidden, which takes on the most varied of forms but in which a “white rabbit” is worrying, protects, assails and reveals itself.

Much could still be said, but I feel that this sufficest to act as a stimulus to look beyond, to try and experiment.