Like Lights Over the Void
by Steve Bisson
We assign meaning to places. Geography does not exist until we observe it, name it, and define its characteristics through words or signs. This idea has been clear to science—particularly modern physics—for a century, having established that objects exist only as possibilities, in relation to the observer.
Piadena, a small town in the heart of Italy’s Po Valley, is the setting captured in Alessandro Zanoni’s photographs. Yet, more than a physical place, it is a landscape that emerges through personal experience—a blend of memories and interpretations shaped by cinema, music, literature, and the images of others. It is a vision that is deliberate rather than accidental—a realization that dawns as one surrenders to the dark, dense, and sinister atmosphere—painted with what Marco Belpoliti, in his book Pianura (Einaudi, 2021), describes as “light that has burst into disintegration.”
Zanoni grew up and still lives in Piadena. Yet residence does not always equate to belonging, and so the question arises—almost as if paying tribute to one’s origins were an obligation. Piadena is a flatland devoted to large-scale agriculture, vast to the point of being immeasurable, defined by a peculiar anonymity that, like the winter fog, obscures clarity. Yet it is within this inevitable, muffled silence—this nocturnal discretion—that Zanoni’s personal geography takes shape.
Through the re-signification of the banal or the brutal, the landscape emerges, veiled in a humid condensation that blurs its contours. That very haze, that alienating sense of indeterminacy, seems to reclaim a right to dream—one so often denied in provincial life. Like Zanoni himself, the viewer remains an outsider, a spectator, standing at the threshold of an escape, conscious of the neorealist twilight of the peasant myth. It is no coincidence that we navigate railway tracks and asphalt, peeling facades, anonymous non-places, uncertain presences, and the silent flow of drainage ditches—caught between nostalgia and a dull modernity.
More than a state of waiting, it is a suspension—a breath held in the presence of an ineffable spell, as if dazzled by lights over the void.
Find out more:
Website: alessandrozanoni.com
Instagram: @alezano
