Beigua Natural Park, Studies on a Liminal Condition

The park sits in the heart of Liguria, suspended between the sea and the Alps. It is a place where an ancient ocean floor has become mountain, and where beech forests grow over ophiolite rock that was once the crust of a vanished sea. It is a landscape of deep transformation, though this transformation is so slow that it appears, at first, as stillness.

Over time, through repeated visits in different seasons and different light, I began to notice something that resisted easy description. The atmosphere of Beigua is not only a matter of weather, altitude, or the quality of the mist that, throughout the year, moves through the beech forests. It is something more visceral: a quality of perception and sensation that the landscape seems to activate. There were moments in which rocks and trees seemed to amplify, to observe and exist in a way that their physical form did not exhaust.

I turned to the historical record of the territory to understand what I was sensing. What I found was a network of Neolithic rock engravings, megaliths, and sacred sites distributed across the park, providing evidence that this landscape had been perceived as a threshold since the earliest human settlement of the region. The sensation I was trying to grasp had a history stretching back thousands of years, showing that I was not the first to perceive this place in this way.

Liminality, in its original sense, refers to a threshold, a condition of being in-between. Beigua exists between the sea and the mountains. It lies between geological past and living present, and between what can be seen and what can only be perceived. The photographs I made there were attempts to remain within that space: not to resolve it, but to dwell in it long enough for something to become visible.

I keep nothing
of when
I watched the mists
migrate.
In the bath
of damp thoughts
I reach out my hand,
but every finger
is illusion.

The mists are one of the most eloquent elements of the landscape. They do not obscure so much as select, revealing a tree here or a ridge there while withholding everything else. To photograph in the mist is to accept a collaboration that follows its own rules. The beech forests emerge from it like presences that allow themselves to be glimpsed. The ophiolites, dark and ancient, hold their ground beneath that veil with what I can only describe as patience.

I have come to think of this project not as the documentation of a place, but as a record of encounters with a landscape that, over time, has been invested with symbolic and ritual meanings, and that continues, silently, to invite forms of perception that go beyond the merely visible. The verses were born in dialogue with the photographs, each extending what the other could not hold alone. The images return the immediacy of having been in that light, in that mist. The verses, instead, seek to reach the slower time in which experience continues to unfold, long after having left that place.