Isabella Nitto and Luca Baioni
Book Review
Artist: Isabella Nitto and Luca Baioni
Photobook: The Halcyon Days
Publisher: ZONE
Specs: Softcover, 24×16,5 cm
Price: €20
“(…) The book reads like a séance between two artists channeling lost moments—not as they were, but as they might have been.“
Memory is an unreliable narrator. It fabricates as much as it recalls. Time creates wounds where there were none and smooths over the ones that should have remained open. In The Halcyon Days (published by Zone), Isabella Nitto and Luca Baioni unearth, disturb, and reconstruct. Their images do not belong to the past or the present, but rather somewhere in between. The book reads like a séance between two artists channeling lost moments—not as they were, but as they might have been.
The title itself is an invocation of myth. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Alcyone and Ceyx are doomed lovers. When Ceyx drowns at sea, Alcyone throws herself into the waves in grief, and the gods transform them into kingfishers. For seven days each year, the winds calm, the waters still—halcyon days, a brief interlude of peace before the storm resumes. But halcyon days are always retrospective. They exist only in memory, already gone by the time they are recognized. The images in this book carry that same tension: a time that once felt endless, is now recovered only through fragments, distorted in its retrieval.
Nitto and Baioni follow the same rhythm of the myth, shaping the book into seven chapters, each corresponding to a different day, and a different movement in time. The sequence is deliberate and cyclical. Like the myth, it offers a momentary illusion of stillness before memory collapses back into uncertainty.
Each chapter moves in sync with a different piece of instrumental music. A synesthetic dialogue unfolds: the etheric expanse of Gastr del Sol’s Our Exquisite Replica of Eternity, the heavy distortions of Hotel for Gods, the decayed tenderness of Penguin Café Orchestra’s The Sound of Someone You Love Who’s Going Away and It Doesn’t Matter. One could follow the images alone, or one could listen, let the sound dictate the viewing, and create new rhythms in the silence between pages.
Walter Benjamin once wrote that “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” Nitto and Baioni seem to be working against this disappearance, summoning ghosts from found and altered materials, distorting them just enough to let new truths emerge. Faces blur, textures fray and a woman sits in a chair as if waiting to be remembered. A body dissolves into the grain of an image. There is violence in this process; memory is torn apart and put back together incorrectly, forming something beyond reality.
“(…) Baioni speaks of unfolding hidden potentials, of making visible what was always there but never fully seen.“
Baioni describes his process as “rigorous indiscipline.” There is no hierarchy here, no division between old and new, analog and digital, surface and depth. Their images exist as objects among objects, things that insist on their own presence rather than pointing to something else. They are interruptions, fissures in time, carrying the weight of what Freud called unheimlich—the uncanny, the return of something that was never truly gone.
Colors pulse—ochre, rust, bruised blues while the last pages are abandoned as if left out in the rain. One wonders if the book is degrading as it progresses, if, by the time it reaches the end, there is nothing left but absence. Baioni speaks of unfolding hidden potentials, of making visible what was always there but never fully seen. Perhaps this is what The Halcyon Days accomplishes. It does not seek to explain or resolve. It does not ask you to remember but to experience the act of remembering itself. The last of the halcyon days, before the storm erases everything.
The Halcyon Days is available for purchase via ZONE here.
Isabella Nitto and Luca Baioni
Isabella’s and Luca’s images have always had a flirtatious relationship in my mind. The darkness in these images is not forced or “anti-something.” They both get some sort of satisfaction in being visitors in someone else’s past, sometimes changing it by interacting, sometimes just observing from a distance.
ZONE
is an independent book publisher and photography based visual arts platform run by its founder, Ali. Started in the summer of 2018 as a personal research project, the aim of ZONE is to cultivate a variety of dialogues between artists and their audience, as well as supporting them with printed and online publications.
Text by Linda Zhengová
Curator of Discarded Magazine & XXX
She is a photographer and writer dealing with the topics of trauma, representation and sexuality.