Absolutely Nothing

What remains of a journey across the American deserts? The blinding light, the dust, the ghost towns and other relics of abandonment: a hippodrome/spaceship, the shores of a fossil lake, a graveyard of airplanes. There also remain the pages full of notes taken over eight thousand kilometres full of setbacks and digressions through California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana. Along this route, together with Giorgio Vasta, are the photographer Ramak – Hawaiian shirt, nice-guy smile and a gift for making life complicated – and Silva, the planning mind and rational barycentre of the trip. It was supposed to be a reportage, a literary guide; but when what happened in the desert – the home of mirages and disappearances par excellence – turns out to be merely the prelude to what was to happen in the life of the writer on his return, the book takes on another turn: the people become characters, and for Vasta the journey through the American spaces becomes one through his own imagination. His words are counterbalanced by the images of Ramak Fazel, which serve as the expansion, verification and, at the same time, the denial of the story recounted. A portrait of America, pondering the American myth and paying homage to its narratives, Absolutely Nothing traces a path that binds documentary writing and fiction, reflection and autobiography, in order to try and understand what happens to places – and to our own existences – when the people who have lived in them (and who have lived in us) move on.