The exhibition unfolds across the three floors of Castello Gamba, tracing an ascending path from earth to sky, and then higher still, toward dream, cosmic space, and a landscape that opens itself to the gaze that moves beyond the mountains.

The journey begins with images of landscapes, portraits of animals and people. They emerge from darkness as lysergic visions.

In the antechamber of half-light, in this middle realm, one can discover how darkness is only a matter of different densities of shadow which, as soon as the eyes adjust, offer breath and refuge: visions of other worlds that begin to come alive, to pulse. Worlds that daylight conceals, extinguishes, renders uniform.

From the half-light onward, toward night and into night, one walks through places where fantasy, imagination, and the senses hold full citizenship, nourished by the unconscious, desire, and instinct. Here the third eye opens, perfectly embodied by the photographic lens of Sophie Anne.

The exhibition’s journey then continues upward. One ascends and enters the sky, into star-filled heavens, an infinite and vertiginous sidereal space of differing luminescences: splashes, maps, and trails in dialogue with the precious, contained presence of small nomadic lights, fluorescences of fireflies in motion within the dimension of a video.

Finally, climbing still higher, one enters the realm of dream: “As a child I could not wait to go to sleep in order to dream; even now I have an intense dream life that is precious to me.” The personal image of a dream appears: a contemporary Baubo with a moon for a head in place of the vagina. An intimate presence of the artist that evokes a female divinity found in certain ancient cultures, such as the mythical wife of Dysaules of Eleusis.

According to myth, the goddess sees through her nipples, which react to emotions, temperature, and sound, and speaks through the vulva, symbol of the origin of the world, of maternal depth, the mouth of life. In the castle’s turret, her effigy, multiplied on a light and transparent fabric, appears as a ghostly presence that dematerializes the reality of space. A dreamlike vision that goes beyond the definition of photography, becoming its trace, its playful imprint, here too poised between light and shadow. Nothing is certain in the realm of dream, a condition that does not create unease but grants freedom.

Meanwhile, in a video, a downy cloud of thistle seeds drifts, carried by a gentle breeze, where they dance and chase one another in a circular and unpredictable randomness of encounters and separations, seemingly staging the existential condition itself.   

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Olga Gambari