The Silent Season

This project is about an Italian island, one of the smallest inhabited, with a population of about 6 permanent residents, and a perimeter of just 2 km. This small confined space has been the focus of my research.

In the tradition of ‘utopian literature’, the island becomes a bipolar metaphor for elsewhere: a place to reach, where getting lost and finding oneself coexist and intertwine in the same defined space.

The concept of "island" is understood both as a self-sufficient universe, a magic circle that encloses and protects, but at the same time also a place of confinement, a claustrophobic trap.

This project is about an Italian island, one of the smallest inhabited, located in a lake in central Italy, with a population of about 6 permanent residents, and a perimeter of just 2 km.

This small confined space has been the focus of my photographic research.

Historically, the island was already inhabited at the beginning of the XII century, reaching a population of 600 people in 1578.

For many years and generations, the community of the island was stable around 200 islanders of fishermen and artisans. From 1950 in on the population starts gradually and inexorably to decrease.

Nowadays the traditions of the island are disappearing. During the summer, for a short period the island becomes a little land of passage for the tourists, but for the rest of the year, during the silent season, time seems suspended, the corners and the abandoned buildings seems like flashes of memory of a past life which I was able to discover trough the photographic archives of the islanders or people connected with the island.

At the end of 2020 I've printed the first dummy of the project, I wasn't happy with the result so I decided to change the approach to the project. I've started talking with the islanders and interviewing them, I managed to collect an historical archive of images of the island. Moreover I get in touch with a great woman, Valeriana Croci, who during the 50's and the 60's she was the teacher of the island, and she wrote and published two books of poems about the island, so I decided to ask her to write by hand some of her poems and I decided to insert them in the sequence adding a new layer to the project and discovering an amazing dialogue and connection between my work as a photographer and her words together with the archive images. I would like to add a translation of the poems in english and put them at the end of the book.

What was really beautiful and important for me is the great interest, enthusiasm and availability that the people of the island expressed during my meetings and interviews with them. I hope to be able to give them back a finished book that speaks simultaneously about my experience and their memories.

I think now the project has the right form, I hope to be able to work together with an editor to view the whole material and create the book.