"Apparitions silvestres" by Seve Squirelle is more than just a photographic series: it is a journey into the invisible, a poetic and sensorial exploration of landscape that questions how we relate to nature—and to images themselves. Seve’s black and white photographs do not describe a place; rather, they evoke a presence: a nature suspended between dream and memory. The deliberate removal of place names is a powerful gesture, one that opens the work to a universal reading, unbound by geography. Landscape here becomes archetypal, no longer tied to a specific point on the map, but to a shared emotional resonance.

The choice of black and white is not merely aesthetic. It contributes to a sense of suspension, to the visual ambiguity that makes each image a threshold between reality and imagination. Color disappears, giving space to light, textures, and the living matter of trees, mist, and reflections. It is a return to the essential—and also a poetic resistance in an age of digital saturation. In a time when everything is immediate and geolocated, Seve’s work invites us to slow down, to get lost, and to reconnect with a contemplative relationship to nature.

This series is also a deeply personal statement. Each image stems from a nomadic and introspective sensibility, where the forest becomes both a symbol and a space of the unconscious. It is a vision of the landscape as a theatre of the soul, a place of otherness and transformation. “Apparitions silvestres” ultimately speaks to a desire to return to nature—not to possess or represent it, but to listen to it. And perhaps, through that act, to rediscover something within ourselves.

At a time when our relationship with the environment is increasingly under strain, I believe it is crucial to highlight artistic practices that explore the bond between nature and psyche, between landscape and identity. Seve’s work fits powerfully within this dialogue: a sensitive and introspective investigation that challenges the boundaries of the visible and invites us to rethink landscape not as backdrop, but as an active protagonist in our inner world. This is why I chose to present her work as part of the NNC Gallery project—because it speaks to the present moment, and also to what is ancient, instinctual, and deeply rooted within us.

Vanessa Rusci,
curator of the magazine

Project

"Apparitions silvestres" The forest, described in its dark and mysterious aspects or as a healing and protective force, exerts a profound fascination on the human imagination. This black and white series explores the evocative and symbolic potential of the forest. Navigating between the real and the imaginary, the mundane and the marvelous, this succession of images is presented as a fictional approach to the "world of the forest." In the shade of trees along waterways from Brazil to Spain, Thailand to France, nature is revealed as a vehicle for the marvelous. The common thread running through these immersive images, somewhere on the border between the possible and the magical, is above all an emotion, the presence of nature as the key to a journey towards the unconscious. After years of photographic travel and immersion in the wilderness, the desire to associate the imaginary with natural spaces became obvious. By superimposing different shots and associating them not in chronological order or geographical proximity, but as a poetic juxtaposition, the idea is to blur the lines of representative landscape photography and turn to the evocative potential of each element to compose a visual ode to the forest. From waterfalls to roots to bridges, the elements collide, juxtapose, and bend to represent the forest in ways that no longer depict just one type of landscape, but a habitat, a setting, and a protagonist of indefinite legends into which we can plunge in the same way that we let ourselves be carried away by these tales that evoke enchanted places.

Artist statement