Being born and growing up on an island means dealing with a microcosm for years and then discovering that everything is different outside: the relationship with time, with space, with nature, with the horizon, with the sea, with the winds, with borders and therefore with limits, but also with events, with the other. I have always been obsessed with small, circumscribed worlds. The island, the hut, the fence. And as a consequence, with routes, paths, and distances that keeps me apart. On the island, you immediately reckon with proximity. The mainland, the continent, everything that is not an island. Being born and growing up on an island also means knowing right away that you can’t always have control over everything: you can’t have it when the sea is so rough that no hydrofoils or ferries leave for days, for example, you cannot have it completely when you are alone in the sea, you cannot have it near the fumaroles or the sources of boiling thermal water. You can’t be in control of everything, but everything is visibly connected. There is a very strong relationship with the environment, the seasons. I feel very attached to the island, I am part of it, as if I were made of green tuff or clay – or more likely both, the result of a process of volcanic stratifications. Reason why I constantly look for the island – and the water. Then there is the relationship with myth, with rituals, with a reality based on the insular dimension.
The island moulds. As an artist he gave me the way, a sort of visual abacus, a dictionary of my own through which to measure myself with the world. I am an architect by training, and even during my university years my interests were connected in a broad sense to the island, to the relationship with the territory. Thanks to photography I found a way to deepen everything. I structured a research, clearly recognized what interested me.
The island is for me a sort of compass, the tool to orient myself.
The concept of limit is fundamental. As a child the island was absolute freedom, as a teenager a mix of love and hate for all the things that precluded me, now a necessary refuge. The island is continuous dualism. It always forces you to measure yourself. But it is not a process that confines and represses, quite the contrary. It opens you up to the horizon: then the border, the clear line between sea and sky, is there – but only when the wind blows from the north.
During the rest of time the border is a threshold, a porous sponge, a point of contact with the other.