This ongoing project is an exploration of the southern coast of Sicily, the southernmost border of Italy. I plan to drive along the coastline that looks directly at Africa, and through the coast to explore some aspects of the identity of Southern Italy.
Sicily is well known around the world for its beaches, its sun, the ancient culture. The coast is overrun with resorts and villages that live only in summertime, and I love to go there during winter, when these places become ghostly clusters of empty houses, totally out of contest. Sometime landscapes and seasons change, and can be found a nobel prize winner’s house, near an electric plant, and then a desert – like landscape. Through Road 115, which runs entirely near the coast, I started exploring these non – places at the outskirts of the empire, their relation with the surrounding landscape and history, their appearance and their solitude.
The Sicilian sea is the boundary line of a culture, the Italian one, caught in its extreme periphery, and is full of symbols which express the identity of italians: places with literary and historical meaning, activities of intensive exploitation, illegal constructions, summer architecture in a winter environment, houses of writers, closure, backwardness, pollution, flooded territories, abandoned railways, military architectures built to welcome invaders, more than fight them. The Southern border is a micro-cosmos that shows how Italians are in relation with the world.