The forty-four large-scale photographs in this series tell the story of the ancestral conflict between man and nature and man and man; nature used as a defence from others, and nature as something to defend ourselves from. The Alps are a symbol of all this, as nature at its most extreme, yet also the site of the last war of position. The project therefore explores the territories and fortifications of northeast Italy connected to World War I, one of the last times when human fate and experience were directly linked to the laws, conditions and control of nature. What is left of that landscape from a century ago? What traces remain of the pact humanity had struck with nature at that point in history?
In three years of work, Valsecchi roamed these mountains with his view camera from winter until spring. Listening closely to what each place had to say, he peered into the abyss of a blind conflict and captured its harsh reality, in a form that is often abstract, intimately aesthetic, and absolute. The images in Bellum are sudden glimpses, portals of light and composition that hover in an endless time between loneliness, isolation and waiting.

This project was commissioned by Collezione Maramotti for the 2022 Fotografia Europea festival, dedicated to the theme of “an invincible summer”: a quote from Albert Camus’s Return to Tipasa, which celebrates the capacity to weather adversity and respond with new reflections on human existence.