Silence/Shapes is an ongoing project, started in 2009 with the aim of giving a shape to silence. In political demonstrations clouds of smoke and teargas are the element entering the scene muting the perception both visually and acoustically: people and movements disappear, sounds are more muffled, and the screams are lowered because of breathing difficulties.

From this reading of landscape the suggestion to use the smoke itself to visualize silence in the landscape, decontextualizing smoke-grenades in places that amplify the feeling of calmness, thus giving shape to what is invisible by its very nature. Opposing the violence of smoke to the romantic idea of beauty is therefore demonstrating that beauty itself can be found in clashing visions, adding political connotation to the deceptively aesthetic result. The visual impact in the photographs of the series is similar to what Kurosawa did with the sound effects in his films, removing the audio suddenly after war scenes, leaving the viewers shocked thanks to the sudden materialization of silence.

Silence differs considerably from place to place and the one you experience at night waiting the traffic lights of a big city is different the one of natural landscapes, so the project which first started in the Alps and in the northern Italian countryside then continued in places with different characteristics, such as Californian deserts and the suburbias of Florida, abandoned Soviet factories or the lush vegetation of the Azores Islands.