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DROPS OF LIGHT IN THE METROPOLIS OF GHOSTS

Drops of Light in the Metropolis of Ghosts is an iconotextual project set in Italy in 1978, conceived as an impossible archive of photographs, Polaroids, newspaper fragments, political leaflets, handwritten notes and damaged images.

Thriller, crime, occultism, alchemy, visual poetry and political memory contaminate one another until they become impossible to separate. Rome, the Moro case, psychiatric hospitals, séances, television, bodies and the ghosts of mass culture drift through a sequence without a stable narrative.

Its visual language moves between Kodachrome, Italian genre cinema, décollage, archival photography and radical 1970s graphic design. Text becomes physical matter: mimeograph, blue ballpoint pen, fragments, slogans and instructions.

In the end, even the killer loses his identity: first a man, then a psychiatric patient, finally a faceless mannequin. Perhaps none of what we have seen ever happened. Only images, documents and a blue sky from 1978 remain.

An archive of something that never existed — but could have.

DROPS OF LIGHT IN A METROPOLIS OF GHOSTS

Rome, 1978. Drops of Light in a Metropolis of Ghosts is an experimental thriller conceived as a damaged archive: photographs, Polaroids, television screens, newspaper clippings, décollage, blue-pen notes and corrupted images. The history of Italy’s Years of Lead collides with Italian giallo, alchemy, visual poetry and a city transformed into a mental landscape. A killer, young women being watched, images that seem to remember other images. The story emerges through fragments, interference and false clues. Don’t narrate. Derail.

GOCCE DI LUCE NELLA METROPOLI DEGLI SPETTRI (Drops of Light in the Metropolis of Ghosts) is an imaginary photographic archive set in a parallel version of Italy in 1978.

Photographs, Polaroids, décollage, visual poetry, crime reportage, Italian thrillers and memory overlap until documentary and fiction become indistinguishable. The cities are real, yet strangely empty; the documents appear authentic, yet belong to a history that never happened.

Each image is conceived as a recovered page: repainted photographs, reflections, mannequins, handwritten notes, damaged film, newspaper fragments and traces of an investigation with no solution.

It does not tell a story. It constructs the memory of an Italy that may never have existed—and yet still seems to be watching us.

An imaginary archive of 1978. Crime reporting, Italian thrillers, visual poetry and radical architecture merge into a montage of photographs, décollage, television Polaroids, handwritten notes and fragments of memory. A tribute to Pignotti, Rotella, Schifano, Argento, Superstudio and Archizoom, where historical reality dissolves into a city of ghosts.