Today, we are focusing on Luca Campestri’s works. Luca Campestri’s artistic research unfolds as a deep, personal reflection on the concept of “home,” explored through a phenomenological and psychological lens. His works stem from a process of deconstruction that probes intimate spaces—attics, basements, lofts—to uncover their symbolic and emotional dimensions. Central to his approach is hauntology, a blend of “ontology” and “haunting,” evoking the persistence of absence: memories and presences that fade yet still shape the present.
Inspired by Derrida and Mark Fisher, Campestri interprets these ideas intimately, where memory becomes living matter, capable of reshaping and resurfacing in everyday gestures. His practice is rooted in Romagna, at the foot of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, where landscapes and creatures carry emotional tension. Otherness, often embodied by non-human beings, becomes a mirror of the self—a projection of fears, desires, and knowledge.
A key feature of his language is black-and-white photography, often shot at night. Darkness, cut by flash or torchlight, is not just a backdrop but an existential state. The absence of color heightens detail, evoking a lucid dream. The Warmest Shade of Grey explores domestic space—from inhabited homes to hunting huts and bunkers—using a 1960s Olympus Pen that produces diptychs of opposites: inside/outside, light/dark, nature/structure.
This theme of refuge returns in Necrovalley, where fragile beach shelters mirror the human need for protection. In Like Velvety Scars, images on velvet—such as a deer pierced by a quill—respond to touch, evoking childhood tactility. In Trapped and The Dreamer Slept but Did Not Dream, infrared cameras capture animals without the artist’s presence, questioning authorship and visibility.
With works like Interstice and Specters, Campestri converts images to sound and back again, using reflective or pixelated media to explore memory as a mutable, fractured force.
