In the non-places where disease dwells

A picture of a hospital window: a polished granite sill and an indoor plant above. The window in turn frames a low roof, surmounted by the grey tangle of ventilation pipes. An initial photographic mise en abyme, which is then inserted into another frame, that of a double narrative: the ecphrasis of the images, depicting what a son sees when he accompanies his mother to the hospital after a suspicious, brief moment of absence, and - a second narrative that has words as its medium - the account of the visits made by the son.

Another shot, the surprise of 'a pair of Aladdin's pointed moccasins, with the toes rounded and curved upwards, ivory white with gold stitching' occupying 'the space with unusual grace' in the waiting room, for the second appointment, waiting for an encephalogram. Then 'no real windows. Only corridors, lifts, and basement floors'. No photos and, instead of the ecphrasis, another kind of description, the one full of acronyms and ungrammatical in the report, which notes a 'voluminous expansive formation with a solid component with transverse diameters of 4 x 3 cm'.

It is a game of mirrors, of bewilderment and sudden, almost imperceptible agnosticism, the delicate narration of a journey through a mother's illness by scholar and poet-photographer Francesco Deotto in Windows.

Her son accompanies her on her visits, visits her during her hospitalisation and each time describes the windows, the play of light on the dirty glass of the fire doors, the opaque windows where, however, 'something can be seen, something, in its own way, gets through'. The photos then depict tiled corridors where the windows are only at the top: you cannot see the world, you only see the sky. And then you can't see that either: corridors without windows, underground corridors.

Short texts, a poetic prose that fits on one page, dry and exasperated in its clinical descriptive precision. Rectangular texts, then, like windows, perhaps testifying also by their shape, to the obsessive and almost casual search for a trace, a concatenation, a regularity that might suggest some meaning, some path, the track to a recovery, while the author never stops playing with cross-references, internal quotations, and replaces windows with memories of Rothko's paintings, or television screens in the unadorned waiting rooms, in the non-places where those struck by a sudden illness live. Non-places that clutter up, like the reports, like the ping-pong shots of the bureaucracy of admissions, ASLs and RSAs, in an incessant digression in which the thread of the narrative is held by a luminous and light despair.