Superstare: Unveiling Arcano is a photographic and editorial project born from an extended dialogue with anthropologist Gabriele Arcano, exploring superstition, gestures, and informal knowledge systems in Southern Italy. The starting point was Superstizione, pregiudizi e tradizioni in Terra d’Otranto by Giuseppe Gigli (1892), a 19th-century compendium of popular beliefs, magical formulas, rituals, and remedies collected in the Salento region.

Together with Arcano, I sought to reactivate this material not as a closed archive but as a living device: fragmentary, disordered, reactivatable. The photographs in Superstare do not illustrate, do not explain. They are counter-proofs, digressions, montages. They hold a tension between evidence and deception, as if each image were both a clue and a concealment.

The project eventually took the form of a book: Superstare: Unveiling Arcano, a publication suspended between document and fiction, where images, notes, objects, and field annotations intertwine like an uncertain lab of verification. The photographs are never autonomous: they engage in dialogue with texts, signs, relics, margins. It is in their interplay that the illusion of knowledge is built — or unmade.

Superstare works within this threshold: between belief and evidence, between knowledge and gaze, between superstition and method. The images offer no answers — only doubts.

They invite us to mistrust the visible, to question transparency.
To believe — cautiously.

Superstare: Unveiling Arcano is my thesis project for the Master’s Degree in Photography at ISIA Urbino.

Puglia, 2025

Photography
Lorenzo Urgesi

Supervisor
Gabriele Arcano
Matteo Guidi