Genova
Landscapes moving through space and time
“Of a city you don't enjoy the seven wonders, but the answer it gives to your question.”
— Italo Calvino
This is a preview of an ongoing project on the town of Genova, in Italy.
In 2022 I was invited by Mossa for an art residency within the project VARIANTE MINIMA.
“VARIANTE MINIMA is a public art project conceived to involve the citizens of the historic center of Genoa, crossing the memory of those who live there.
VARIANTE MINIMA comes to life to investigate and artistically reinterpret the feelings and dynamics peculiar to the migration process, focusing on the stories, objects, texts and memories of those who left, those who stayed and those who arrived in the city of Genoa, in the time span between the late 19th century and today.
The close relationship with the public is realized through the direct relationship of the artists with those who inhabit the city in order to realize a production in the field of contemporary expressive languages (visual arts, performing arts, design, audiovisual, photography, music, writing, digital, graphics...) developing research, processes and realizations open to experimentation, even in a transdisciplinary dimension.”
Starting with those concepts, migrations and memory, I decided to vote myself to a landscape project in several chapters.
Not all of them have worked out so far.
I’m currently working on two chapters.
THE MIGRANT PLANTS: landscapes that are organized around plants that have come from outside of Europe in many ways. Some of them have been here for hundreds of years. This is a way to address the theme of migration without showing people. I found out this could also be a way to travel in space through the plant itself: You are looking at this city on the Mediterranean sea and suddenly an element of its landscape is forcing you to travel to Argentina, to Canada, to Japan. Is everything connected? Are we a clash of different cultures, different materials, different seeds? Which are the stories that have shaped our background and our landscape?
TRAVEL THROUGH TIME: landscapes of architectural elements (infrastructures or building complexes) that witness the transformations of the city through the centuries in relation to migratory fluxes.
Many photographers have an architectural background. I do not. And I will try to not build any “architect” awareness. I’m trying to look at landscape with a different approach and a different point of view. This may well be the only contribution I can give to the field.
