The Dawn On A Dark Sublime project by artist Silvia Mariotti investigates an extraordinary natural phenomenon characterized by a strong historical connotation – the artist has in fact chosen to photograph vertical caves, chasms, large sinkholes in Istria and Karst known as foibe.

These sinkholes are a controversial subject – both in the public debate and in the personal exhibition of Silvia Mariotti in which sublime notions of nature intertwine with historical thought.

Photographs, videos, sculptures and sound installations convey the visitor a double sublime horror: the magnificence of the depicted nature that touches our perception, but also intends to convey historical implications. The title is a reference to memory, to the process of remembering, to casting light on a nocturnal subject through artistic research – DAWN is in fact the dawning that gradually leads to light.

This is an unpublished work that is offered to the public for the first time at the A plus A gallery. It consists of fifteen works including sculptures, photographs, videos and sound installations resulting from the study that Silvia Mariotti has been conducting on this subject for more than two years.

Works that the artist has developed through fieldwork in the landscape itself, searching for caves that have been abandoned for decades and are known only to local people.

Illustrious predecessors have attempted similar endeavours – in 1861, Felix Nadar was the first that took a camera into the underground of Paris, beating his colleagues in the initiative to take photographs in the sewerage and catacombs of a major metropolis.

It was then that for the first time the lens was attributed with the ability to make discoveries and the art of photography was born – the photographic and sculptural project of Silvia Mariotti is just like the enterprise of Nadar – a sublime discovery.

In recent decades, the foibe have become a symbol of recent history of Italy and Istria. For the collective imagination, these caves, like Pandora’s box, seem to contain all the evils of the twentieth century.

They have become the catalyst of ethnic hatred, of war crimes against the Italians and the local population, of experience of exile and of a great trauma of the nation that originated in the period between the two world wars.

But these caves are also a natural phenomenon. The foibe do not tell only the history of Europe in the 20th century, but tell also a story of nature and geology spanning millennia and of a number of literary, psychological, theological, mythological and aesthetic suggestions.

When JULES VERNE, for example, visited the Istrian town of Pazin and the Pazinčica river that flows through the valley, he imagined a parallel reality within the hollow-earth, in which the protagonists of his famous adventure novel Journey to the Center of the Earth discovered in the center of the planet a world where there are underground seas and electric radiation, as if they belonged to the prehistory or to alien universes.

The exhibition of SILVIA Mariotti is not only a revisit of recent history, but it also aims to be a revelation of a unique natural phenomenon.

In the work of the Italian artist, all these meanings manifest themselves in the eyes of the visitor who learns to juggle with multiple levels of reading that can open to interpretation and that can broaden the horizons which are often limited by historical traumas.

The exhibited works require above all an individual look and memory of the visitor, because the dimension of memory is something that mainly concerns the individual. And exactly this is the magic of the sublime: although it concerns the intimate sphere it has the strength to open up the access to a more authentic view of nature and history.