Garden Of Elsewheres

The project explores the phenomenon of return emigration in small communities of central Sardinia. Through objects, domestic environments, portraits and signs in the landscape it aims to bring out the fluidity of the concept of cultural identity.

For the social sciences, the concept of identity is based on the encounter with the other. Recognizing oneself as an individual is therefore a game played by creating an exchange with diversity. A generative process, anything but static, where experience and social dynamics are the matrices of a transformation. In political discourse, however, the word identity becomes a conservative, exclusive tool, often bearing marginalization and dangerous fractures between us and them. An inverted telescope, which looks at the past in a reductive and short-sighted way, which excludes from the dominant narrative the history of perennial migration which is simply the fulcrum of life on Earth.

But what happens when our being, built on the confrontation with the different and the discovery of new realities, finds itself dealing with a present that still keeps one foot in the past? What happens when you emigrate and then return to the place you left from? These are questions that do not have univocal answers, there are many variables. ‘Garden Of Elsewheres’ collects fragments of this big bang by relating landscape and domestic environment, enigmatic objects and the gazes of people who have lived most of their existence far from their native country. The aim is to bring out the fluidity of the concept of cultural identity, erroneously and too often pigeonholed into those of tradition, folklore and belonging.

Rural Sardinia, at the centre of a process of depopulation for more than half a century and, at the same time, affected by a tourist rediscovery trend, is suspended between the slavish search for some sort of authenticity, for more or less invented traditions, and a multifaceted reality resulting from the returns of those who find themselves in this small slice of the world, after a life on the go.