Pietro Leone
Moving between documentary practice, audiovisual installation, photography, and sound experimentation, Pietro Leone combines observational and reportage-based work with a research approach that engages with fiction cinema and video art.
The series Harlan’s Cities addresses the theme of urban and architectural space, pushing the recording of reality toward a plane of invisibility, distortion, luminous fragmentation, and progressive abstraction.
Photographed in motion—in an attempt to balance presence and dissolution, contrasts and veils—the subjects acquire a liquid or impasto-like consistency reminiscent of painting, while the cities themselves are transformed into dystopian, oneiric, and visionary places.
The title refers to Isaac Asimov’s novel The End of Eternity (1955): aboard his “chronoship,” the Eternal technician Andrew Harlan travels through time, which has been rendered a malleable and controllable substance by the regime of the Eternals. In doing so, he traverses eras, images, and distorted dimensions, as if they were flashes imprinted onto a “molecular film”…