the port trilogy : La lunga notte
If art is a therapy, its capacity to gain autonomy in adversity remains, for me, an unresolved mystery. Why Palermo, at that precise moment in my journey? I shall never know, but the rediscovery of this series of photographs—a vague memory carefully buried—was a shock, so vividly did it capture those shapeless weeks of precarious balance, dark, violent, and grim. From the walls of Palermo, although flooded with a heavy Mediterranean sun, oozed this furious darkness. In my wild race, in my perdition, I had chosen my setting.
Bruno Green, Palerme, août 2018.
With La lunga notte, Bruno Green delivers a text that oscillates between intimate narrative and epic poem. The work opens with dense, introspective prose, as the author evokes a stay in Palermo where, paradoxically, he discovers neither the city nor the country. The Sicilian capital becomes a mental backdrop, a mirror of a state of exhaustion and solitude. We will not elaborate on the causes of this state; those who know the man and his journey will quickly detect certain clues, but that is not the essence. By visiting the antechambers of hell, the author accepts confronting his torments, and in this suffocating atmosphere, the city transforms into a symbol of inner darkness, set against the backdrop of Letizia Battaglia’s photographs and Wim Wenders’ *Palermo Shooting*.
Lecture Critique, Michel Baillargeon - 2025
La lunga notte is published by Éditions QazaQ as part of the Maison Poésie Brest collection as a digital edition,
and by Silent Graphics Éditions as an art book available on our Boutique page.
In Palermo, I saw neither Sicily... nor Palermo.
I encountered only myself. Alone, naked on a bed of misery, within the abstraction of days and the shadowy room of an empty apartment nestled at the top of a wide stone staircase, I remained lying down, hostage to a scorching summer barely softened by the noisy efforts of a wheezing air conditioner.
With broken bones and exhausted senses, I confronted myself, torn apart by the listening of an obsessive voice—a stubborn plea that, in an ultimate instinct attempting to split the darkness, refused to yield to silence. It was conscious that the evil affecting the soul is known only to itself, fundamentally unshareable and at a formidable distance from any consolation.
The night weighs heavy,
The day stands still.
At the steady pace
of one second after another,
everything drifts away.
Inner fall,
Alone with your breath,
Resources
No longer endure
The confrontation.
Perishable properties,
Flavors of an era,
Slip through the meshes
Of a gutted trawl,
To join
The common grave of time
And its eternal silts.
