To see Mirko’s work is to find yourself suddenly awake, but in the middle of a riddle. You can’t really decide whether the images are meant to help you solve it, or whether these pictures are from your own memories of the event, almost as though you were there yourself, in the dead of night. A witness. ‘A big influence for me has been the movies, much more so than other photographers. And in my work, I really try to get the feeling of being in the action. When I was working on the series on exorcisms, I didn’t really want to investigate whether it was true or not; I just wanted to feel what it could be like to be involved in that – to witness and take part in an exorcism’. Mirko’s early project, Christus_DEL is a haunting body of work, which initially began through his experience of attending numerous exorcisms through a disciple of Father Gabriel Amorth – considered the world’s leading exorcist until his death in 2016. In time however, Mirko began to be more intrigued by the disciple himself. Known to us through the initials C.D.V, the young man received the signs of Stigmata when he was a child, and has since led a life of deep religious devotion, studying to be a priest, but has also faced fear, distrust and ostracisation from the wider community around him.

Through Mirko’s images, we enter a world infused with pathos and the desperation of belief, but also the strong pulse of love, care and even hope. As a viewer, Mirko pushes you straight through your morbid and shallow interest in the unknowable, into a world suffused with the truth of human emotions, and the surest sign of a miracle that we possess – that of true belief.

The beating, feeling, desiring, loving heart that makes us human is perhaps most apparent in his ongoing project, Map to the Star. Mirko and his partner divorced when their daughter was just an infant. To be a father to her amidst the complicated realities of court mandated visiting times has been a challenge that Mirko has had to confront and adapt to as his daughter has grown, just like millions of divorced or separated parents everywhere. Mirko describes fatherhood as an act of becoming, of growing and learning through time, and navigating uncharted landscapes together. Indeed the exploration of uncharted terrains have quite literally brought Mirko and his daughter closer. Both of them are immensely fascinated by space. ‘My daughter is a space junkie, she’s passionate about stars, planets and aliens, and it led me to start playing with the idea of space as a metaphor. Looking around me, there was a lot of stuff we had shared that held some reminder to a space adventure. And when it comes to movies that inspire me, I have to mention Interstellar, which is a movie about love. Space in the film acts like a director, connecting the plot together, but basically it is a movie about the strength and resilience of love’.

Map to the Star was made amidst the stringent lockdowns imposed in Italy through the Covid-19 pandemic. But it depicts an adventure that transcends the boundaries not only of home and community, but those of planets and even galaxies. Mirko’s daughter appears to us as a consummate explorer, serenely stepping out into the unknown, but somehow still protected by an invisible aura. And although the shadows of mystery and even danger lurk within the images, even coming to the fore in some instances, the young explorer seems unfazed, and with her, we too can’t help but feel braver, and find our own curiosity leading us as we travel with her.

Mirko’s most recent body of work, The Fourth Kind, takes this heady mix of curiosity and subtle trepidation and dials it up to a new dimension. Supported by the 2022 Arttaca Grant for Photography, Mirko began to explore stories of unexplained bright lights, reports of close encounters and other strange phenomena in the highlands of central Italy. Fascinatingly, Mirko’s work always takes as its base true and verifiable evidence before taking a leap into the uncharted. Here, it is police reports, filed by people who claimed to have encountered unknown beings, and were shaken enough by the experiences to report them to law enforcement. ‘Once again, I was telling a story you can’t really see’. Although Mirko describes his process as translating the reports he accessed into visuals, it is evident that the work is about so much more.

To say that it is haunting is not enough, to say it is eerie is to only sense a part of it. The black and white photographs obscure much more than they reveal, and you are left with the feeling that you are wading into a puzzle, one that you probably will not be able to solve. You cannot easily say that these are UFOs, that these are true images or false ones, that people are lying or telling the truth about what they experienced, or even whether you believe or you don’t. Instead, you oscillate, between myth and reality, between the story and the official report, and between your imagination and your desire to make ‘sense’ of it all.

Mirko Viglino’s ongoing project The Fourth kind is currently showing at RDX Offsite, Bangkok, as part of the Arttaca Group Exhibition, from October 1st to the 31st, 2022.