Appunti per una topografia della tensione

The Agro Pontino landscape embodies a constant tension between human reclamation and the marsh’s persistent return: a hybrid, unstable ecosystem where nature and culture remain inseparable.

Every landscape we inhabit is the result of a negotiation between the human and the non-human.

The starting point is the Agro Pontino, a landscape that carries its own contradictions, marked by the original trauma of malaria. This trauma gave rise to the comprehensive land reclamation that reshaped the topography of the land, transforming the marsh into a productive and habitable space for humans, yet without eliminating the tension that runs through it, which remains in a state of permanent suspension. The marsh persists: in its margins, in its vegetation, in the need for continuous maintenance, without which the land would slowly revert to its original state. It is a landscape that exists only in opposition to what it denies, and yet cannot do without what it denies in order to exist. This persistence is not a defeat for humankind, but the concrete form of an interdependence: the non-human shatters the illusion of a clear separation between species, bodies and the environment.

The work begins as an open forum: visual hypotheses, unstable connections, images that interrogate their sources without claiming to resolve them. It explores the landscape as a threshold, a porous space in which one moves between different scales, which normally do not intersect, without establishing structural or permanent hierarchies. The images attempt to visually navigate this tension, presenting the territory as a hybrid and unstable ecosystem, to be inhabited consciously.