This series of photographs documents the life and creative process of a Neapolitan artist, Bizia Cesarano, within her old family home, which she transformed into her studio in 2021. I inhabited these spaces with her on a daily basis and witnessed the creation of the site-specific exhibition Plots Under Trial, developed between 2023 and 2024 within the studio itself. In this work, the artist used the house as a metaphor, creating a journey to reflect on the superstructures and burdens that society teaches us to internalize. Learning to free ourselves from them—to look beyond—is a daily practice that must evolve from being individual to becoming collective.

Plots Under Trial was a process: a descent into an inner realm that was completely unknown, often frightening — a cavern that became a mirror for Fabrizia and for me, as I observed the reflection of her soul and life in that deep, shadowy space. It constantly offered us answers in the form of new questions. The golden glimmers and colorful trails Fabrizia traced were nothing but fragments of truth — always relative — that the process allowed to emerge, unpredictably. More than once, the abyss we stumbled into left us drained, unable to go on. Our steps felt emptied, as if the questions and discoveries went too far beyond — or were too overwhelming for — who we were at the time.

The credit for completing this journey is entirely hers. She never gave up on trying, desperately, to understand herself — so deeply rooted, yet so willing to cut those roots with courage. That determination is evident in the look she gives in a childhood photograph, taken in her grandmother’s bedroom. Moving through this labyrinth — whose walls we couldn’t even see at first, and which now feels like more than just a house — became a steady and multifaceted progression. It was a journey shaped by an unpredictable spiral of cycles, distances, closeness, seemingly idle pauses, sudden accelerations, silences, and leaps.

The Atelier embodies the unity of space and soul — a surface and a volume that hold our entire past and present life, guiding us into a wholly new future, itself a fertile result of who we are and what we discover along the way. Everyone needs a place where they can abandon all illusory certainties and allow themselves to reexamine everything — to project the sketches of their existence onto the walls, drawing new paths to follow, small conclusions, emotions, new states of consciousness.

Life in the Atelier is infused with a mysterious, self-generating beauty — one I managed to capture in fleeting moments, often marked by low light. I believe this strong presence of shadow and darkness represents, both materially and symbolically, the alchemical operations taking place there: abandoning the ego, leaving the mask at the door, extinguishing the light of false security to reveal the truth of the unknown — of the unconscious still sleeping within us, which Fabrizia draws out like water from a well.

By Eduardo Scarfoglio