Volcanic Attitude 2025 - Where Matter Dreams and Transforms

The starting point is Naples, between the glass panes of the Museo Mineralogico, where the rocks of Vesuvius tell the story of immeasurable time with the patience of those who have seen whole eras pass. Volcanologist Valerio Acocella guides the gaze into the depths, there where matter is compressed, shaped and transformed. And from there the vibration starts. The heart of Volcanic Attitude 2025 begins to throb through images and sounds that shake the body even before the mind. In the projection of "Shaken Grounds Shifting Skies," lava becomes a vehicle for a dystopian narrative, populated by scarlet larvae-meteors traversing magma-carved landscapes. The artist becomes a living seismograph, set among the rocks: who can really enter the heart of the vibration? A body, perhaps, that can listen to it.

From Naples we set off for Stromboli on the ferry Caronte Laurana. On the deck of the ship Margherita Morgantin has set up her "GRANPAVESE" an installation made from the flags of the International Nautical Code, here rewritten by the artist by altering the colors, pink instead of red and fluorescent orange instead of yellow. These seemingly innocuous hand-sewn flags silently shout the coded message "INVIOLABILITY OF THE FEMALE BODY." The phrase is by Lia Cigarini and points to a fundamental principle of difference feminism, which Morgantin invites us to reflect on.

As the Sun rises, the black sand of Stromboli welcomes a small gesture bordering on the absurd: Roman Signer walks with a boot and a jet of CO₂. It is a seemingly simple action, but each step reveals the silent relationship between visible matter and cosmic forces. It is a scene to be observed surreptitiously from a distance, as if it were a secret ritual of which we are latent spectators.
All around, nature tells its story without words: Stromboli and Strombolicchio - the son and the father - stand out against the deep sea, which touches one hundred meters in places. Volcanologist Francesco Sortino, between forkfuls of food and storytelling, takes us beneath the sea, all the way to beyond the crust: where Africa and Europe met there was the Tethys, an immense and deep ocean that survives today in the dark color of the Ionian Sea. When the plates touched, the Alps were born. When they compressed, volcanoes were generated. The Aeolian Islands are young, barely 300,000 years old. But they already carry everything within them: fire, change, memory.

At Vulcan, the landscape seems to breathe on its own.
Roman Signer gives us another of his performances. He reproduces for us a miniature volcanic explosion in the beach dunes, causing a frying pan to be punctured. Almost as if it were a ritual, he plunges the pan with the pierced bottom into the sea causing water to drip from the hole, in invitation to reflect on the ancestral relationship between fire, water, earth, air and human action.

Francesco Cavaliere invites us to lose ourselves in the Valley of Monsters, where lava has sculpted forms that seem to come from ancient and remote dreams. His performance "Subaqueus Glim" is a dive into the sea of the subconscious. The volcano becomes a mirror of the soul, a map of buried emotions. And in this choral fiction, just as in dreams, an enigmatic figure emerges: the volcano, the last image imprinted in the mind before awakening. Cavaliere works with sound as if it were lava: he samples it, suspends it, makes it a vibration that hangs and spreads in the air. He invites us to build of a "box" to sleep and dream inside the volcano, a sonic womb where the dream of the island can continue even with eyes closed.

Then comes Luca Trevisani, with a gesture that is both violent and poetic: he creates sharp sculptures out of obsidian, an ancestral material, turning them into makeshift knives, like those built in prison from toothbrushes. He invites participants to cut off a lock of hair. It is a daily ritual, a small sacrifice, a symbolic act of metamorphosis. The hair is buried in the sulfur pit: the offering is made. Art here is direct contact with life, without distance. The sculptures - black, primitive, sharp, monstrous - seem to come out of a new mythology, created with wounds and living matter.

The day continues to La Fossa crater. Here, amid vapors and silences, Federica Di Carlo presents her touching performance "Heat and Solitude," conceived together with volcanologist Francesco Sortino. Her works cannot be seen, they can be felt: the oxidation, the temperature, the breath of the earth.
Later, Margherita Morgantin's guided meditation returns us to the volcano as a living being. She invites us to breathe it, to listen to it with our bodies, to forget for a moment the idea that the world revolves around humankind.

And finally the sea. The festival closes in the waves, Trevisani makes his gesture for the third and last time there, among the breaths of the island, which is now no longer a physical place. It is a state of mind. A threshold.

Volcanic Attitude 2025 was not an event to "visit." It was a rite of passage. A slow transformation, like silica becoming obsidian, like lava becoming an island. It showed how interminable geological time and ephemeral human time can touch each other, if only for an instant: the moment when a gesture, a vision, a vibration breaks through to the deep.
Because the volcano does not speak: it vibrates. And those who know how to listen can recognize in themselves the sound of that transformation