I love to sail forbidden seas is a photo-essay by Milan-based photographer Arnaldo Abba Legnazzi, celebrating the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia. Designed by Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish cultural complex was built starting from 1996 and inaugurated in 1998. It includes, among others, architectures such as the Hemisfèric – that hosts a planetarium – and El Palacio de las Artes Reina Sofìa, conceived to place an auditorium for 1,706 people.

According to the photographer, visiting the place is like “sinking in an aquatic world of giant mythological sea-creatures from the imaginary of Herman Melville or Jules Verne”. The structures recall the prehistoric monsters of a fantastic world, on which Abba decides to focus: architectures are transformed in rocky shells, fins, gills, scales and wings. Lights and marked shadows describe an environment where time and space disappear, a place that is also reminding us “our ruthless and unavoidable destiny: born from water, dependant on water for survival, and finally dissolving to dust (ie water absence) when dying”.