Two Thousand Light Years from Home reveals concealed traces of a city. At first sight the photographs taken by Pietro Mattioli show cryptic vertical structures and intricate patterns, deploying their own beauty by being reduced to their complex forms, surfaces and colors. A closer look exposes familiar objects like trees, fences, masts, lattices so as stairs or walls.

Mattioli focused on those ordinary objects while strolling like a flaneur through his neighborhood – during three seasons, at night, while his child was asleep, as far as the radius of the baby phone allowed him to go. He scrutinized this clearly defined area with a flashlight, that isolated the hidden objects from the black of the night. The result is ultimately alienating and takes the familiar even more far away from the common, not to say two thousand light years from home.

By documenting his nocturnal excursions, Mattioli created a typology of the everyday, that focused on these well-known details, nobody really spends time to look closer at. Two Thousand Light Years from Home offers this opportunity, although a steady gaze is needed. As the book itself as an object intensifies the alienation by unprocessed pages, that try to divert a quiet look. Two Thousand Light Years from Home presents a selection out of a series of 80 photographs.

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