With CIRCUS, Roman photographer Emanuele Giacomini pursues a line of research that moves along the edges of reality, where life becomes imagination and imagination exposes the real. After exploring human intimacy in projects such as Fenditure and Il fiume della luce, Giacomini chooses to cross the hidden territories of the mind—those that don’t appear on maps but that we all carry within us.

The beating heart of the project is the Psichiatric Circus, a theatrical and circus show by the Nouveau Cirque company, inspired by the visionary atmospheres of Cirque du Soleil yet reinvented in a disturbing, provocative key. No animals or trapezes here: beneath the big top move grotesque figures, tormented souls, characters suspended between madness and poetry. They are masks that recall what society excludes, but which in the artist’s gaze become mirrors—surfaces on which to reflect our own fears and fragilities.

Giacomini’s photographs do more than document: they become visual thresholds, open windows onto a parallel universe where reality twists, masks itself and reinvents itself. Faces, bodies and lights convey stories of exclusion and resistance—unsettling, fragile beauties that question us without the need for words.

CIRCUS is also a reflection on our time—on the sunset of traditional circus and the digital spectacle that seems to have replaced wonder. Amid pixels and special effects, Giacomini reminds us that authentic emotions—the ones born of human contact, the tremor of a body, a glance—remain the most powerful and universal.

Through his lens, the circus becomes a collective rite, a space of catharsis—a place to laugh, cry and be afraid together. And it’s precisely there, at the heart of the staged madness, that CIRCUS reveals a truth that is more uncomfortable yet profoundly human.