The Square and the Crowd: Finding Entropy Before the Framework

“Non-places are the real measure of our time.” — Marc Augé

It began as an uncomfortable observation: that some of the most iconic places in Italy had ceased to exist as places.

The Problem of the Square

The Square, Venezia Santa Lucia, Campo dei Miracoli, Manarola — these works were made before the Compass of Light had a name, before the four archetypes existed as a formal system. They were made from something simpler and more urgent: the feeling that something was being destroyed in plain sight, and that photography was the right instrument to document the destruction.

The method was layering. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of photographs of the same location taken at different moments, accumulated into a single image. Tourists in transit, crowds in motion, bodies passing through spaces they had traveled thousands of kilometers to see and would forget within days. Overlaid, they dissolved. Individual forms collapsed into collective visual noise. The place — the architectural signal, the historical identity, the spatial coherence — disappeared beneath the statistical weight of its own visitors.

Manarola was selected as a semifinalist at the Urban Photo Awards 2025. At the time, I understood this as recognition of a social observation. Later, I understood it as something else entirely.

I need a coffee.

The Realization

For a long time, these works felt parallel to the rest of my practice — important, but difficult to place. I was working with light in 820 and Spectral Spring, investigating how light carries information and transforms perception. The overtourism series felt different: more social, more documentary, less concerned with light as such.

I did not know where they belonged. But I felt that they belonged somewhere.

The realization arrived not from the images themselves but from the question I kept asking while making them: what is actually happening here? The answer, when it finally came, was not sociological.

It was thermodynamic.

Crowds behave like molecular gases. As density increases, agitation increases. As agitation increases, disorder increases. The identity of the place — its architectural signal, its cultural coherence, its capacity to mean something specific — dissolves under anthropogenic pressure exactly as a signal dissolves into noise. What I had been documenting was not overtourism. It was entropy. Social entropy, in the urban space.

This was the conceptual key that unlocked everything.

Eschaton Without Light

Once I understood that these works were about entropy, a new problem emerged: how did they fit into a practice grounded in light?

The Compass of Light, still unnamed but already forming in my thinking, was built around light as the carrier of entropic processes — the medium through which information travels, degrades, and disappears. The overtourism series used light technically, as photography always does. But light was not the subject. The subject was the dissolution of place.

The reconciliation required time. It required the conceptualization of light as a carrier of entropy rather than simply a medium of vision — the recognition that the Compass could operate wherever entropy operates, and that light was its instrument precisely because light is where information lives and dies.

When that understanding arrived, the position of these works became clear. The Square and its companions are pure Eschaton: the choreographed dissolution of a signal under overwhelming entropic pressure. The subject is not the crowd. The subject is the place that experiences the crowd as noise — the architectural identity that collapses, layer by layer, into statistical indifference.

One-day ticket can bring you everywhere. 

The Key That Opened the Framework

Looking back, this corpus was not peripheral to the research. It was the moment that clarified what the research was actually about.

The Oracle, the Alchemist, the Demiurge — these three archetypes all operate through light in ways that are legible, intuitive. But the Eschaton, the most philosophically demanding of the four, revealed itself first not through light but through space. Through crowds and piazzas and the slow dissolution of place under human pressure.

I was not studying light. I was studying entropy. Light was the carrier — the medium through which entropy becomes visible, measurable, and aesthetically significant. The Compass of Light exists because of this realization. These works are its unexpected foundation.