The cycle of the seasons is a temporal reference that coincides with climatic conditions, hours of daylight, and temperature. It is a physical, astronomical fact. Equally physical is the effect that these changes produce on personal sensitivity, on society, and on the economy. Some iconic places of vacation and carefree living, for example, go on a seasonal break every year, and their spaces and structures are transformed into the set of a theater temporarily out of use or under maintenance. And yet, everything is still there: the beach, the sea, the rental villas, and the homes of those residents who, for the other half of the year, can once again become the protagonists of the place and not just fleeting passersby, blended into the tide of tourists who fill the streets and outdoor cafés. Everything is there, only under a very different light and skies that aren’t always clear.In the enforced silence of the seasonal shift, these places reflect on themselves, they rest, they plan for the future and experiencing them even in the winter light, or just before the grand opening, is an opportunity to think about the faces and dynamics of the city. The project Infiniti. Durante il silenzio is made up of that necessary kind of "walked photography" — the one that connects you with the territory and helps you understand it. The itinerary, in this case, is the Palermo coastline, located in the northernmost part of the city, in the VII District: Partanna-Mondello. The beach of the people of Palermo. Leisure spaces are strategic hubs for understanding a city. They are designed to serve a specific purpose and deliberately set themselves apart from the rest of the urban fabric they belong to. And it is within this naturalized fiction that the most delicate key lies—where everything hides in plain sight. The special attention paid by local administrations to these sites reveals both the weight that seasonal tourism holds in city budgets and the need to compensate for systemic shortcomings with amusements or one-off services—more tailored to tourists than to citizens. In this way, the experience of the city itself changes, even of one’s own hometown. This is one possible point of view on one of the many dynamics observable in often complex, tourism-oriented cities. It’s for this reason that some of these photographs have also found a home within projects of a similar nature and broader scope — like Palermo Periferie, curated by Sandro Scalia, which systematically and methodically extends the photographic investigation of the “cities of Palermo” to many other areas of the city, continuing the gaze of great names of the Italian photography, who first began this research. Infiniti. Durante il silenzio can only be considered as a project of observation, rather than a finished investigation — proposing instead a necessary method of looking at the world.
