Aurelio Galfetti Castelgrande

“Preserve = Transform was the slogan hold up through the long process of restoration that lasted more than twenty years. In the relationship between ancient and contemporary, in this unavoidable conflicts someone can really face this straight comparison between past and present without subordinating the latter alleging the higher values of the past. In the past, during 6000 years, from the birth of the Neolithic village on the hill, this relationship has been repeatedly made without the difficulties which today meets, giving the whole building that particular beauty that comes from layering different ages. I did not want to stop this process during my task, but give it continuation in the contemoporary world. However, after 25 years of works, what will be more enduring is that done quietly, disregarding major conflicts: the introduction of the territorial dimension and scale within the concept of restoration. The comission was only about the buildings on the top of the rock. I believed it was more important to give the restoration an urban dimension. In the end, the project developes some secondary spaces to support the city producing a park, a public park in the city of Bellinzona only made of rock, stone walls, four trees and a lake in the sky. A park is a place to go and stay, an so this proposal involves a route through a public space, a void that connects people with the great landscape down to lake Maggiore, on the Alps” – Aurelio Galfetti

“I have been always fascinated by the intense dialogue between human hands and nature, especially in their strong expression of subtraction.

In these contexts, I probably perceive architecture as a chance for a more personal and introspective path, where photography is just the consequence of a process.

Respecting the complexity of such a majestic project, I felt the need to focus only on this specific moment: the prologue of the space experience, the entrance.

Through a partial, fragmented, and unclear series, the idea was to do not unveil everything about this story but only a measured transition.

By this approach, I am just trying to activate a process, I want to have the viewer with me at the same time, at the very beginning of this experience, doing together the very first few steps to be in front of this incredible door of the castle.

I try to keep these images open enough, more as questions than answers, to make the viewer free to see what they want to see and let them proceed into the image and the story in the way they feel by themselves.

The entire work was realized on a cloudy early summer afternoon when I went there with my film camera and one roll only, to extremely force myself to focus only on what I was feeling.

Eventually, I definitely realized that there is something about this powerful space that cannot be said, something special that cannot be limited to a photograph.” – Simone Bossi, on her personal photography series on the project realized in June 2020