THE JOURNEY OF LOST STEPS

Their position, which I never change, is sometimes surprising but what strikes me most is that very often they are in good, if not excellent, condition.

Everything evokes questions about the history that brought them there… and, although abandoned shoes are nothing but scraps, waste, and as such completely insignificant, perhaps they can become decidedly more important if we consider them from a philosophical point of view.

“The Journey of the Lost Steps” is a photographic series of abandoned shoes that symbolize the crisis of human action.

The quantity of images and the repetition of the subject are intentional, to represent the entity and the disturbance of the degenerative element.

The photos were taken in India, Morocco, Japan, Holland and Italy. The scenes were not altered in any way, either during the shot or in post-production.

The human journey. This is how the long process of our evolution (or involution) is often defined and conceptualized.

And what could be the most representative object of the human journey, if not shoes?

Shoes are one of the main elements that distinguish human beings from other species, an example of evolution, the result of observation skills, intelligence and logic.

They accompany us along our journey, step by step… and at each step we have the opportunity to grasp new ideas from what surrounds us, use them to enrich our experience and then act coherently.

However, it seems that this ability is in a critical phase. We carry out illogical actions without worrying about their catastrophic consequences and, even when we experience these consequences first-hand, we persevere.

The last decades have been a growing parable of human activities that undermine the concept of evolution, generate degradation, social unrest and put our very future at risk. We create harmful contexts for which we then publicly despair, but in an end-in-itself manner, without developing stable and lasting solutions.

Just think of the aberrant phenomenon of waste, which changes our perception of the environment to such an extent that in many places people have begun to consider it an integral part of their natural habitat, without even thinking of eliminating it;

the lack of interest in climate change that is favoring the emergence of serious problems for our ecosystems;

the media that make us focus on dramatic events or events full of negativity and violence, almost absolutizing this part of reality;

the provocations and disproportionate reactions that create conflicts that we let grow until they degenerate into endless wars.

This situation is the result of a succession of actions linked to the spasmodic tension to “have” immediately and at all costs, to the inability to stop, observe, listen, learn and evaluate long-term action, but it is also the result of the inability to change.

Stopping means losing a piece of “having” and therefore “it cannot be done”.

It seems that during our journey we have lost the ability to learn from each step and consistently improve. It is no longer a path built from a logical sequence of steps, it is rather a confused pile of individual steps, after each of which we lose the memory and vision of the goal.

We risk losing the sense of our walking and canceling the level of evolution achieved with difficulty over millennia.

In other words, we could say that we are gradually “abandoning our shoes”, even though they are still in good condition.

In this way our abilities, our “shoes”, are destined to become nothing but rubbish and eventually disappear, leaving only a footprint on the frozen snow or a “trompe-l’œil” of themselves printed on a sticker.

Our journey risks becoming “The journey of the lost steps”, unless that glimmer of common sense prevails, which in the end always accompanies us and has always saved us, represented in the last image of the series.