“Put flowers in your guns” opens Proposta, the song by the Italian band I Giganti presented at the Sanremo Music Festival in 1967. Flowers, nature, weapons: seemingly antithetical elements, often framed as opposites. Yet the distance between them can be shorter than we think.

Proposta puts together two bodies of images. The first draws on archival photographs from the ICCD (Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, Rome) showing farmers cultivating vegetable gardens in the trenches of the First World War: the same spaces built for destruction repurposed, out of necessity, for survival. The second consists of close-up photographs from both military and agricultural technical manuals, isolating the gestures of the hands.

By removing any clear visual reference to the tools in use, the work places hands at the centre: the same gesture, the same knowledge, the same care, regardless of what is being held. The ambiguity between the two bodies of images invites the viewer into a space of uncertainty, where the boundary between nurturing and destroying becomes difficult to locate.

Proposta is a reflection on manual knowledge, on communities built around shared practices, and on the thin line that separates acts of care from acts of violence.

Honorable mention at the PhC Capalbio Photofestival 2020