by Christian Roccati (writer)
Right now, I am a reader: I take Polar Lights and, after being fascinated by its cover, I open it. A cold wind from the North blows on me: at first, it seems to me to be an authentic breeze that reminds me of the colourful candles burning through lodge windows on Christmas night; then the air becomes stronger and deeper. It is a powerful and ancestral energy that speaks to me now and brings me back to a wild and indomitable nature that does not want to keep quiet.
These photos lead me far away, beyond the North Sea, to the top of the world, in a desert full of everything, closer to the cold space than to the Earth. I leaf through and the colours dance, they enchant me with whole universes through the crystals of frozen water and with huge heaths full of all those questions that we did not know we asked and that are part of us.
I realise that “desert” is a wrong word that cannot really paint this non-place where life goes not only on all fours, but crosses the skies and the oceans, free to show its variety and beauty. I am thrilled, I feel a spark in me, like when as a child I glimpsed the paths and the traces of an unknown world of which, however, I felt I had always been part of.
This volume is pure sensation; this graphic work transforms colours and shapes into tactile and sound suggestions. It is not “only” an extraordinary graphic book; the images over these pages become photos as means of perception. These sights are a real engine that intrigues the readers and lets them to inform themselves, to give value to what is not seen but is there.
The Arctic is not just mystery: I wish I could say it was there before us and it will be there after our disappearance, but I am sure only of the first thesis. It is an amazing realm which suffers from the climate change and its change could totally change life as we know it.
The authors Claudio Ghiglione, marine ecologist and Kailas guide, and Marco Gaiotti, naval engineer, are both photographers and explorers/travellers and they have been very smart in offering not a big, but an infinite wonder. The reader will fall in love with this Absolute and maybe he/she will learn to defend it, dreaming to be part of it.
I want to thank these two artists of the Being because I know that one day, not so far, I will visit these places or go back there.
