Eleonora
Busato
In the Light of a Miracle,
2025
Digitized 135mm film negatives, serving as the source images for In the Light of a Miracle.
In the Light of a Miracle is part of a broader artistic research that investigates the spiritual dimension of - and in - photography, understood not in a confessional sense, but as a realm of attention, questioning, and relation to the real. The project approaches landscape as a symbolic field, taking the garden as a site of revelation and responsibility.
The work originates from the encounter with an actual garden, observed and documented over several months, and unfolds as a reflection on the ways in which belief systems shape the spaces we inhabit and, more fundamentally, human relationship with nature. Within this framework, the garden is conceived as a “sanctuary of truth”: a delimited yet permeable space where tangible geography intersects with a symbolic dimension.
Drawing on the etymology of the word paradise—a walled enclosure—and its analogy with the photographic viewfinder, the images function as contemplative thresholds, devices of attention through which the fragility of the landscape is brought into focus.
Digitized 135mm film negatives, serving as the source images for In the Light of a Miracle.
Light occupies a central position, both technically and conceptually. It is light that generates the images, but also that gradually consumes them, activating a process of continuous transformation. The works are analogue solar prints based on iron salts, subsequently subjected to a toning process using vegetal materials sourced from an antotypic garden cultivated by the artist. The organic matter reacts with the photosensitive base, producing unstable hues and tonal variations destined to evolve slowly over time.
This instability is not incidental but structural to the work. The images are semi-stable, traversed by an extended temporality that renders visible the cyclical and vulnerable nature of the landscape. Their mode of presentation is integral to this process: displayed without protective glass, the works remain exposed to light, allowing the process to persist beyond the moment of exhibition.
Engaging with the notion of the garden as “the time of the Other,” In the Light of a Miracle proposes an artistic practice in which photography becomes a site of relation and receptivity, a form of care that entails aesthetic, ethical, and ecological responsibility. Suspended between document and imagery, the landscape emerges as a space of transformation and potential redemption.
In the Light of a Miracle
Iron salt solar prints with plant-based toning on cotton Hahnemühle paper,
6x9 cm (each print)
Exhibition view, In the Light of a Miracle, GRANDA, Palazzetto Tito, Venice.
October 5 – November 23, 2025.
Curated by Antonio Grulli.
Exhibition view, In the Light of a Miracle, GRANDA, Casermetta Napoleonica, Forte Marghera, Venice.
December 12, 2025 – March 1, 2026.
Curated by Antonio Grulli.
Produced by MUVE – Emeroteca dell’Arte.