NAFAS

Self-Publication
2025

NAFAS serves as an investigation into the sensory and temporal experience of the landscape, moving beyond traditional documentation to explore the island of Pantelleria as a rhythmic entity.

The title, borrowed from the Arabic word for "breath", establishes the project’s internal logic: a sequence that oscillates between observation and immersion, witnessing and dissolution. Rather than offering a geographical portrait, the work acts as a visual registration of the location's pulse, capturing moments of suspension before they dissipate.

The project’s methodology is defined by the recovery of specific archival tools: a forgotten analogue Pentax and expired film stock found in a family archive. This choice of medium is structural rather than nostalgic. The technical limitations and the chemical instability of the material are employed to reject digital precision, favoring an instinctive, "anti-technical" approach where composition precedes intention and focus becomes secondary.

Visually, the work adopts a reductionist black and white language. By stripping away chromatic data, light is treated as physical matter, abstracting the environment into a dialectic of solids and voids, presence and absence. The resulting imagery deconstructs the landscape into textures of volcanic rock and water, translating the tension of the place rather than its appearance.

Conceived as a self-produced and self-edited publication, the book functions as an autonomous object. Detached from its author upon release, it transforms into a spatial experience for the viewer: a site to be inhabited, navigated, and breathed.

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