Five portfolios, each including five images from Mike Slack’s exhibition ‘THE MUTATION: Walking with Manzoni’ (exhibited in New York at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, October 10 – December 15, 2022), printed at A5 (148 x 210 mm) in editions of 5. Each set of prints is enclosed in a manila envelope printed with a different quote from Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed).

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Portfolio #1:

He walked and walked, coming to farms and villages, continuing on without stopping to ask their names.

Portfolio #2:

Anyone who spotted a weed in a neglected field—a nice wild sorrel, say—and wanted to know whether it had come from a seed that had sprouted in the field, was blown in by the wind, or had been dropped there by a bird, would never, no matter how long they pondered it, reach a conclusion.

Portfolio #3:

The learned borrowed whatever delusions of the common people suited their own ideas. And the commoners borrowed whatever they could understand, and as best as they could understand, from the hallucinations of the learned. And from the combination of the two, an enormous tangle of public insanity was forged.

Portfolio # 4:

Only a few days later, the rain would wash away the contagion. After that downpour, though the plague could not restore all the lives it had extinguished, it ceased to swallow any others. Within a week, homes and shops opened their doors, and talk of the quarantine quieted to a whisper. All that would remain of the plague were the occasional vestiges that a scourge always leaves in its wake.

Portfolio #5:

When he’d tell the story in great detail in his later years, and at great length (everything leads me to believe that our anonymous author heard the story from Renzo himself more than once), he would say that as far as he could remember, the whole night might as well have been a dream.