Please, could you stop the noise?
Maurizio Ciancia
noise (archaic or literary: rumóre, romóre) – noun [Latin rumor -ōris] Any sonic disturbance that, emerging from silence (or even from other sounds), gives rise to an acoustic sensation: “the world ceased all motion and every sensible noise”(Leopardi). It is therefore synonymous with sound, but is mostly used for sounds subjectively perceived as non-musical, unpleasant, disturbing, annoying, or even harmful.
Notes:
Sensory saturation: noise fills space, often without harmony or direction.
Chaos: the antithesis of meditative emptiness, noise may represent the external world that invades and disrupts.
Intrusive presence: while emptiness leaves room for imagination, noise occupies it, preventing deep listening.
What shape does Silence take?
The perception of Emptiness and Space helps me bring order to the daily overflow. It’s a matter of SPACE.
Acknowledgements Stefano Ciol, Marco Codognotto, Luca Colussi, Rudi Delago, Peter Demetz, Gabriele Lorenzoni, Gerald Moroder, Georg Mussner, Julius Peratoner, Martina Rier, Cultural Association Tubla da Nives
Although this is a personal project, it has grown thanks to all those who, directly or indirectly, contributed to its development. A broader thank-you goes to everyone who, over the years, has been open to dialogue and fruitful collaboration, making further contacts and partnerships possible.
With additional collaboration from:
Cultural Association Play Art, Alta Val Torre
Marco Codognotto – Modern and Contemporary Art
The screening is accompanied by drums, percussion, and sound effects by Luca Colussi.
The video is available at the following link.
(...) Scientific studies on the detection of generative images versus real photographs confirm that even trained experts struggle to distinguish between AI-generated visuals and authentic photography: as of June 2025, the human error rate had already exceeded 30%. According to critics such as Fred Ritchin, this new era renders the visual image “untethered” from reality, amplifying the risk of misinformation and accelerating the erosion of photography’s remaining documentary value.
In this epochal context, Maurizio Ciancia chooses to remain faithful to tangible reality, documenting true, physical, human spaces—or those on the verge of abandonment. The emptiness he photographs is “real,” not artificially constructed. Through natural light, industrial geometries, and rigid compositions, he elevates architecture, diffused light, material textures, and the scale of industrial environments.
Emptiness becomes a perceptual threshold, a silent density, a space-time pause. Absence transforms into potential presence, into emotional tension. For Ciancia, Emptiness is an antidote to the daily overflow—a form of inner balance necessary to perceive order, essentiality, time availability, and the possibility of welcoming selected thoughts and intentions, rather than the external overstimulation that overwhelms us in contemporary life. Placing Emptiness at the center, making it a punctum in absentia, does not reflect a social or political stance foreseeing depopulation or industrial abandonment, but rather a search for inner awareness of one’s true personal needs. The contemporary human, bombarded by information and immersed in an ever-expanding iconosphere, needs Emptiness—the freedom to define one’s own available Space.
In this sense, Ciancia’s photographic approach stands as an antidote to spectacle and ephemerality: it is slow, silent, resilient photography that entrusts materiality with interpretive space.
It’s a matter of space is therefore not just a title: it is an invitation to look differently, to question places, to measure the distance between memory and erasure, between reality and fiction. In an era where images can be fabricated, Ciancia insists on the real, offering a gaze that is at once documentary, aesthetic, and meditative. He rejects both the illusion of immediate truth and artificial simulation, proposing a gaze ethically rooted in reality and technically refined. (...)
Gabriele Lorenzoni