Fermo Immagine | Torre di Mosto

Between 2012 and 2017, Andrea Morucchio explored and photographed the industrial area of Porto Marghera, a vast and complex territory on the edge of the Venice Lagoon. The solo exhibition FERMO IMMAGINE (2017), presented at the Museo del Paesaggio (MUPA) as part of the FREEDOM Project curated by museum director Giorgio Baldo, brings together a selection of works from Morucchio’s long-term project PTM Porto Marghera 2012–2017. The FREEDOM Project features four simultaneous solo exhibitions by contemporary local photographers, each presented in a distinct space within the museum.

In FERMO IMMAGINE, Morucchio captures what critic Stefano Cecchetto defines as a “suspended time”—a fleeting moment in which the landscape seems to detach itself from reality to inhabit a metaphysical elsewhere. His images transform the industrial ruins of Porto Marghera into a space of silent transition, where the tangible and the visionary merge.

Morucchio’s gaze navigates the post-industrial landscape as both witness and interpreter. His compositional choices—cutting light, lingering shadows, and chromatic tension—reveal a “painterly conception” of photography, in which the interplay between nature and architecture generates what Cecchetto calls a “perception of landscape” rather than its literal representation.

Through a continuous dialogue between macro and micro structures, Morucchio shifts the viewer’s focus from the foreground subject to peripheral horizons, unveiling layers of meaning that extend beyond the visible. The recurring industrial elements—tankers, cranes, cables, pools of ochre liquid—become emblems of transformation and memory, echoing both the grandeur and fragility of a civilization built on production and decay.

In these works, the artist does not document reality; he reinterprets it through what Cecchetto describes as “a temporal shot contained within a state of mind.” Morucchio’s “unnatural landscapes” are places emptied of human presence yet filled with emotional resonance—a “quiet before the storm,” suspended between memory and foreboding.

Ultimately, FERMO IMMAGINE reveals the invisible within the visible: the emotional vibration of a place at the threshold between disappearance and rebirth. By connecting the eye, the mind, and the soul, Morucchio’s photography transforms Porto Marghera into a mirror of contemporary existence—a landscape of reflection, metamorphosis, and timeless stillness.