Shores of our Inner Sea (on-going)

This is a photographic journey that takes the observer among the islands and coastlines of the Mediterranean Sea. A journey that as stages will include southern Italy; northern Africa; Greece and the Balkans; the beaches and hills of Lebanon and the Holy Land; Provence and Algeria; the Bosporus and the Aegean Sea – this journey has just begun.

What do the Mediterranean and the South mean? Is the former a place of confrontation and encounter? Is the latter synonymous of backwardness and degradation? The aim is to give new dignity to this ‘fragmented’ land and sea; and at the same time, to profess alternative paths of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ from those imposed by the North-Western paradigm based on the free market, the accumulation of capital, the clash of civilizations, the ideas of unlimited technology and progress. The South (and therefore all the Souths of the world, or the Global South) has within itself certain traits to be rediscovered, reassessed and accepted: moderation between extremes, slowness, rest, appreciation of the present, of the here and now; respect for limits. If the Mediterranean is the south of Europe, the Mediterranean is the first ‘piece’ of the world’s peripheries (Africa; Asia; the Middle East; Latin America).

Western philosophy was born in Greece because it was here that the ancients dedicated themselves to a certain type of navigation, sometimes very short, between one cape and another; between one island and another; between archipelagos and coastlines: departure yes, but also return. Here lies the birth of critical/philosophical thinking and ‘awareness of limits’ – which help human beings avoid the emergence of the ‘fundamentalisms of the land and the sea’. The land recalls the absolutism of belonging and ethnicity, while that of the sea is linked to blind faith in technological progress. On the contrary, we should aim ‘towards the center’: an imaginary and inner place (but one that is then concretely externalized) where we can cultivate ‘moderation’ and amplify our mastery with respect to ‘cognition of the cardinal points’. What is the center? If we were North, we would point South; if South, North; if West, East and vice versa. Today only two directions are pursued, here the lack of ‘moderation’.

The South urges to have its say on how to deal with today’s challenges humanity is facing, both in terms of nature and the encounter and appreciation of the Other, and in creating a more equitable world – one with less injustice. Indeed, the time has come for the North to listen to the voice of the South and benefit from its ‘newfound wisdom’. This photographic journey draws on a vast literature, also interdisciplinary in nature, concerning the Mediterranean region and the study of so-called ‘Meridian thought’; to name a few authors: Fernand Braudel; Albert Camus; Carl Schmitt; Pedrag Matvejevic; Franco Cassano. The latter’s essay Pensiero Meridiano (1996) is the cornerstone of my visual research.