​​Altera Mundi – Interview with Mauro Splendore

“Altera Mundi” – the Next World, is the latest project by Mauro Splendore, an Italian photographer who, through this photo essay, seeks to interpret what our planet will be like after Humanity.

Hi Mauro! It’s a pleasure to have you for this interview. To begin with, could you introduce yourself to our readers?
Hi! Thank you for this great opportunity, I’m honored and thrilled about it. I’m an Italian photographer. I was born and I’m still living in a small town in central Italy. Photography has always been present in my life, but only in 2018 I did understand its strong expressive potential, so I decided to embark on an authorial path. I attended several courses, workshops and classrooms with national and international important teachers to start working seriously on the issues which most I’m interested in, as precisely the relationship between man and nature. Given the great proximity of my country to both the mountains and the sea, since I was I child I have always gone to both, thus learning to know and love Nature. Perhaps it is precisely this atavistic relationship that sparked my interest in photography, and beyond, towards environmental issues from which my first photographic work was born, “Altera Mundi”.

​​”Altera Mundi” – The Second World, or the Next World, is your current photographic project and, probably, of a lifetime. Please tell us about it.
An Indian saying goes, “Man says time passes, time says man passes.”. This maxim has been somewhat of a guide that has led me through this work. “Altera Mundi” is, in fact, a photographic journey into a dystopian world, a fantasy journey, at times even surreal, in which I try to imagine the scenario of our planet at the end of the human era, the one that is described today under the term “Anthropocene”. I hope that this view of mine is as far removed from reality as possible, but there are many studies that reveal how current development patterns are leading in that catastrophic direction that I describe with pictures. Altera Mundi is not meant to be a pillory for possible culprits or a recipe for hypothetical solutions. As a photographer, in fact, rather than giving answers, I would like to fuel debate and critical thinking by asking and wondering what we can do in our own small way, what habits we can change, and what our priorities are towards the planet