Orizzonte

Orizzonte is a verbo-photographic installation portraying places in Tyrrhenian Calabria marked by movements of matter and people between land and sea.
The work is made up of thirty-six photographs arranged in a continuous sequence, like a single strip of light, in dialogue with the architecture of the exhibition space. Over each image is a line of text handwritten in marker, transcribing a passage from Giuseppe Berto’s novel Il male oscuro. The Venetian writer lived for years at Capo Vaticano – a viewpoint from which some of the photographs in the installation were taken. Berto reflects on the fear of crossing the sea, in a way that seems to allude to overcoming one’s own limits, and so concludes by watching the lights on the other side of the coast, towards Sicily.
The photographs portray various excavated topographies, where the underground becomes visible: a sand quarry later recognised as a geosite of marine fossils; a church carved into the rock by a group of sailors as an ex-voto for surviving a shipwreck; rock caves, once grain stores along transport routes and later stone dwellings. There are also emerging topographies, where matter comes to light, such as the two volcanoes Stromboli and Etna, whose movements have marked the territory, and the port of Gioia Tauro, a hub for goods along the coastline. Born in the context of the visual research for the video project Oltremare (2025), the installation becomes a topographical fabulation connecting the different layers of a territory in transformation, in which the image becomes text and the text becomes landscape.