With Ciò che resta Antonio Di Cecco does not simply observe a landscape: he lets it surface through his own processes. The work is an enquiry into the river as a natural element set within a wider terrain animated by plants, flowers and the natural architecture their tangle produces. The river is permanently present even when the water disappears, leaving room for the brambles and the growth that inhabit its margins: this is a narration of the river “in absence”, or through a fleeting, fast-moving presence brought out by long exposure. It is a narration of time, or rather of the two times that work on water and on vegetation — one quick and ungraspable, the other so slow as to be imperceptible. The choice of black and white is a clear decision to stay focused on the essential, on the shapes and lines created by the plants of the fluvial terrain: an evocation of states of mind rather than an account of the visible and the real. Alongside the photographs are cyanotypes, in which the image appears through a chemical process that makes the sheet light-sensitive. The cyanotype is therefore a trace, the emblem of an event that has inscribed itself into matter and, like the river, leaves marks of its passage on the banks. If the photographs show what water feeds in the world, the cyanotypes show what water writes directly onto the sensitive surface. The project is accompanied by the essay “La forma delle cose più umili e contingenti e asimmetriche”, written by Antonello Frongia.