Garden of Elsewheres

By exploring return migration in rural Sardinia, Garden of Elsewheres reflects on the fluid nature of cultural identity beyond fixed ideas of tradition and belonging.

The project explores the phenomenon of return migration in small rural communities of Sardinia. Through objects, domestic interiors, portraits, and traces within the landscape, the project reflects on the fluid nature of cultural identity—too often constrained by rigid notions of tradition, folklore, and belonging.

From a social sciences perspective, identity is shaped through encounters with the Other. It is not a fixed condition, but a generative process driven by experience and social dynamics. In political discourse, however, identity is frequently instrumentalized as a conservative and exclusionary concept, producing divisions between a “we” and a “they.” This backward-looking gaze reduces the past to a simplified narrative, obscuring the continuous history of migration that lies at the core of human life.

The project asks what happens when an identity forged through displacement and exposure to difference confronts a present still deeply rooted in the past. What does it mean to return to the place one once left? These questions resist singular answers. Garden of Elsewheres assembles fragments of these trajectories, creating connections between landscape and domestic space, enigmatic objects, and the gazes of individuals who have spent much of their lives far from their place of origin.

Sardinia—affected by depopulation for more than half a century and simultaneously subject to renewed touristic interest—exists in a state of suspension. It oscillates between the search for imagined origins and invented traditions, and a multifaceted reality shaped by return: by those who come back to a small corner of the world after having lived within broader, more open contexts.