'Films of Sicily & Sardinia'
(Photographs from performance,100 xA5)
Moving. Growing apart. Catharsis. These three actions have defined my way of living since I was a very young boy. My family is originally from Sardinia, but I grew up between Sicily and mainland Italy. As a 'son of emigration' - as I ironically define myself most of the time - the sense of return has marked my life very deeply, coexisting with the opposite desire to be elsewhere from where I was at that precise moment. I consider myself a sort of stateless person, having lived in totally different places: moving from Sicily to the Po Valley, from Tyrol to Venice, from Lisbon to Florence, from Madrid to Bologna, I am currently in the East Midlands, where D.H. Lawrence was born one morning on September 11th, in 1885.
The core conception regards the search of the spirit of place amidst the concept of insularity and commonalities between Mediterranean landscapes. The 100 prints retain memories of places and people of Sicily and Sardinia in 2021, during which Freedom to roam was prohibited due to the world pandemic.
Sea and Sardinia is a beautiful book; alive with the people Lawrence saw and flickering with his thought processes as he encounters them. The idea of a travelogue with a photographic apparatus was amongst the editorial intentions of the writer for the first edition of Sea and Sardinia in 1921: among other titles, Lawrence had suggested Sardinia Films and Films of Sicily and Sardinia. Although the writer had pressed Sardinian photographic studios to receive the images, those photographs of places and people remained stuck in who knows which archive in Cagliari. The publisher, Thomas Seltzer, in agreement with the writer, opted for colour illustrations whose realisation was entrusted to an eclectic South African artist, Jan Juta.
There were countless reasons that convinced me to embark on this long journey, which would redefine itself as a further personal return to the sea and Sardinia.
I wanted to give myself the pleasure of using my own film camera, continuing in the search for my analogue photographic language. Between May and August 2021, defying the outbreak of the pandemic, my partner and I visited the Lawrentean places setting off from the Sicilian city of Taormina (where Lawrence and Frieda lived from 1920 to 1922), sailing from Palermo to Cagliari, and finally getting to Terranova/Olbia. His celebration of the beauty and vitality of the earth anticipated the environmental concerns that are central to the global debate on ecology today. As the ecology through which he travels changes with the changing Mediterranean landscapes, Lawrence recognizes the action of his elements in a holistic vision of reality. For my part, through the observation of those same places a hundred years on, I have strengthened my awareness of the importance of sustainability and the protection of nature. It is through real-life relationships, discoveries and encounters that one learns to read the complex language of the Oneness. And the journey….never ends.