The Gardens of Phoenix

Iceland is a young land, shaped by geology that is still in motion. Here the surface is never definitive: lava flows, basaltic scoria fields, and volcanic plains overlap in irregular layers, creating a porous, fragile, seemingly hostile landscape. It is precisely on these seemingly barren lavas that some of the island's slowest and most delicate life forms thrive: mosses. In particular, vast areas are covered by Icelandic moss and related communities, organisms that can take decades, sometimes centuries, to stabilize on a lava rock. For this reason, many of these areas are now protected: stepping on them means irreversibly damaging an ecosystem that does not have the ability to regenerate in the short term.

The last days of my first trip to Iceland were marked by persistent bad weather. Rain, wind, and low skies left very few opportunities for photography. I was leaving the region of the great glaciers, dominated by the imposing presence of Vatnajökull, when, along the road leading towards Vík, the landscape suddenly changed its language. Along the roadside, continuous, undulating, almost unreal stretches of moss opened up. We had already passed them on the way there, but only then did I truly understand their visual power. With the grey and uniform sky, the green of the mosses was not crushed by the light but emerged with intensity, creating a deep and silent contrast with the low clouds.

These places cannot be freely traversed. Precisely to protect the fragility of the moss, Icelanders have created small marked paths that allow visitors to observe and cross the landscape without damaging it. Moving along one of these paths, I was not looking for a specific event or spectacular light. What held me was the continuous variation of shapes: soft and undulating surfaces, tiny ridges, depressions that changed rhythm with every step.

The difficulty was not finding something to photograph, but choosing. I wanted to convey the dynamism of these forms without losing their intimacy, to show the movement of the landscape while maintaining a precise point of focus. The Gardens of Phoenix stems from this need: not to document a place, but to tell a story of balance. A primordial garden, born from volcanic destruction and slowly regenerated by time.

Something profoundly human is reflected in this silent resilience. Like moss taking root on lava, life often finds new forms precisely after fracture, after collapse, after what seemed definitive. This is not a sudden rebirth but a slow process, made of adaptation, patience, and resistance. The Gardens of Phoenix is also this: the possibility of rising from one's ashes, transforming what was destruction into fertile ground for something new.