Dazzling Black: Antonio Biasiucci’s Photography of Catastrophe

Abstract

This interview with photographer Antonio Biasiucci explores his lifelong engagement with the primordial forces, rituals, and landscapes of Southern Italy, where catastrophe is not an event but an existential condition. Through autobiographical reflections, Biasiucci recounts how photography emerged as a transformative “gift,” allowing him to translate personal loss, volcanic wilderness, and ancestral materials into a secular form of sacredness. The conversation examines his relationships with masters such as Antonio Neiwiller, his theatrical method of continual self-revision, and his approach to darkness as both identity and language. Biasiucci reveals how error, metamorphosis, and narrative imagination shape his visual “scenarios,” where images cross temporalities and shift scale, generating post-apocalyptic worlds suspended between memory and renewal. His practice ultimately frames photography as an act of excavation, a way of giving meaning to death, matter, and the fragile architectures of existence.