About This Project

IL CERCHIO MAGICO
Psychedelic colors, abstract, shimmering forms swallowed by the darkness.
Total darkness, black as black, where those shapes float, merge, intersect, like pieces of a dream or omens of an ominous time ahead. But those shapes are hands, they are feet, and bodies, and that darkness is not only our deepest night, that of unconsciousness or childhood. That abyssal darkness on which these wide-eyed signs shatter is the circus space, a quintessential mythical, mystical, world, so remote and outdated as to seem magical, today more than ever.
And it’s probably the magic, the cipher which the photographer Massimo Siragusa has captured deep down in these splendid pictures dedicated to the world of the Circus, a dreamlike, spectacular magic, an unforgiving, overwhelming magic.
Which may become hallucination.
That is how, in his pictures, the trapeze artists take on the most daring challenges with the void and with the light, soaring without memory or gravity in the performance space. That’s how the riders burst in on winged horses attracted by that vortex, a trunk is the orbit of a flying saucer, and the acrobats move on the moon, and the women become fairies or ghosts.
It’s madness.
Yellow sky, red water, blue flames. Cones of light, ectoplasms, apparitions. Reverberations made crazy but at the same time calmed by the distance, as happens to dreams the day after. Visions, that’s it, Visions of the circus, but more.
ELVIRA SEMINARA

These photos won 1st prize in the Arts Stories category at Word Press Photo in 1999