The Silent Season

“I had already found that it was not good to be alone,

and so made companionship with what there was around me,

sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self

(…)let fail all else”

Joshua Slocum, “Sailing Alone Around the World”

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 inspired by an Italian island, one of the smallest inhabited, with a population of about 10 permanent residents, and a perimeter of just 2 km. This small confined space has been the focus of my photographic research.

Like a solitary player who relies on the chance of a roll of dice, also my experience with the island is marked by encounters with places, figures, situations that happen by chance.

As a flâneur who wanders in the streets with the aim of knowing and experiencing, so I mapped the island in a casual way, returning over and over again to the same places, seeing them under the different lights of day and night, in the different seasons of the year, following the slow and silent rhythm of the island