La teoria del vuoto. Tommaso Bonaventura, Alessandro Imbriaco, Fabio Severo

La Teoria del Vuoto (The Void Theory) originates from a photograph depicting a scene of everyday life in Buccinasco, a suburb near Milan. Years ago, in that quiet rural setting, some weapons were found, hidden or abandoned by unknown people. This discovery gave rise to a web of episodes, places, and people that spread across Italy, reaching as far south as Platì, a small town near Reggio Calabria whose history has been intertwined with the one of Buccinasco for decades. The photograph stems from Corpi di Reato. Un'archeologia visiva dei fenomeni mafiosi nell'Italia contemporanea, a photographic project by Bonaventura, Imbriaco, and Severo, presented for the first time in 2012. Corpi di Reato explored the Italian landscape in search of the traces left by the mafia, grappling with the invisibility of this widespread and ever-changing presence, which has transitioned from violent massacres to silent infiltration. La Teoria del Vuoto picks up this investigation, taking it in new directions where the central question becomes how photography can continue to narrate and document today. The void serves as a metaphor for the expansion methods of organized crime: void can be understood as the permeability of territories unprepared for the criminal threat, the ease with which clans establish themselves; a void is also what they carve out in the social fabric, eroding legality. Lastly, the void also reflects the gap between the surface image and the deeper reality of places like Buccinasco and Platì: the former appears to be an orderly town in Northern Italy, while the latter is a hidden stronghold in the Aspromonte mountains.