Tripping in an Italian Forest Morphed into an Art Project

If you’re fortunate enough to find yourself exploring the Foresta di Mercadante in southern Italy, keep an eye out for two young, bearded Italians — one holding a camera, the other drawing flowers — with looks of wonder on their faces.

Emilio Mossa and Piero Percoco have been on a years-long journey to creatively catalogue this ecosystem for their running art project, MERCADANTE. They’re not ecologists, but they can tell you everything you need to know about the forest’s ineffable charm — plus a little about the secret to a peaceful life. 

“We continue to discover things in the same place,” said Mossa, speaking about their weekly trips to the forest. “This is a very important lesson for us — even if you go to the same place, if you have the possibility of being concentrated, you will find new things.”

Mossa is the one with the coloring tools. Toward the start of the pandemic. Five years ago, he was running around Milan, grinding out a career as an architect at a big firm. Work was everything, until the 33-year-old decided to leave his economic safety net and pursue a slower-paced life in the coastal city of Bari, about 40 minutes east of the Foresta di Mercadante.

The one with a camera is Percoco. The 37-year-old with a sizable social media following has had his photos of Italian life featured by The New Yorker and The New York Times, but he also found himself in a rut a few years back when he began seeing more and more images in the world of documentary photography that reminded him of his own.

Everything changed when, one day, the two friends decided to take a walk. 

They were on mushrooms when they first wandered out into the Foresta di Mercadante together in 2021. Unsurprisingly, nature opened its door to the curious travelers, inspiring new levels of appreciation and connection that they’ve since kept close like a talisman. Every leaf and rock imparts something onto the world, and that realization blows their minds.

After that first walk came another walk. Then another one. Then another. Today, Mossa and Percoco say they’ve been visiting the Foresta di Mercadante to take pictures and draw in unison a few times a week for almost every week since their first venture at the start of the decade. 

“Little by little, this place that we don’t know started to feel a little bit like home,” Mossa said. “Some place like home that we can go and sit. When you have some problems, you can go there and walk and feel like it’s a little bit home.”

Percoco’s photos capture the actual scenes they crossed: sunlight refractions, fields, flower patches, and sunset skies — the arguable origins of beauty. Mossa’s drawings are live interpretations of those moments, and they have a child-like, 2-D quality that probably isn’t dissimilar from Henri Matisse’s most frenetic dreams.

In its simplest interpretation, MERCADANTE is a “process to understand nature,” says Mossa. But it’s also deeply existential: “Making photos and drawings of nature is a way to understand ourselves,” he says. 

“When you usually see pictures [on Instagram], like one second and you go on, you can’t really understand and go deep inside the topic,” he said. “Our work is about living in the present and staying there in that moment, and trying to make people do that.”

“Simplicity is difficult,” adds Percoco. No — he corrects himself. “It’s invisible.” Both statements were likely true for this pair in the pandemic era, as they hungered for a purer way of living and working. They seemed to have found that purity in the Foresta di Mercadante, and they keep finding it every time they go. 

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