Bellinzona Secret Garden

Black Flowers Secret Garden was born in March 2020, in the silence of lockdown. Yuri Catania goes out into the garden at night with an LED torch and photographs the flowers where they grow, without ever cutting them. The dark erases the background and the light isolates one bloom at a time, turning it into a portrait.

It is a photography of waiting and listening. At night the garden ceases to be decoration and becomes a secret place, where forms, colours and textures that the day disperses surface with an almost theatrical intensity. Each shot is a brief encounter: the flower stays where it is, and of the encounter only the image remains.

Bellinzona Secret Garden takes this research into public space. The flowers photographed in the Parco di Villa dei Cedri and in the garden of CasaGalleria in Rovio became the matrix of a participatory street-art work on the Visconti stairway. Printed on biodegradable paper, cut out and pasted onto the steps together with the citizens, they bloom for a season and then dissolve, like real flowers. The photographs in the series are available as fine art prints in a limited edition of 5.