Isula Anima

Isula Anima is a long-term project born in 2022 in my ancestor’s house in southern Corsica. It explores the invisible transmissions of memory and myth inscribed in the island’s landscape.

Isula Anima is a long-term project exploring the invisible memories and myths embedded in the ancestral landscapes of Corsica. Born in 2022 in my ancestor’s house in Petreto-Bicchisano, a small village in southern Corsica, it began as a personal and family-driven quest. For three months, I lived alone in a matriarchal home that had long been inaccessible due to family divisions. The house, emptied of archives, carried an invisible presence that seemed to linger in its walls, floors, and furniture. Guided by the elders of the village, neighbors who had known my foremothers, I collected stories, beliefs, and traditions still alive today. What started as an intimate encounter with family history became a profound engagement with the territory of my ancestors, approached entirely through the prism of memory.

Corsica’s insularity intensifies this encounter. Its rugged mountains, ancient rocks, twisted trees, and abandoned ruins stand as silent witnesses of deep time, guardians of a history that predates human presence. The landscape itself often takes on human forms, echoing gestures, silhouettes, and presences that connect the body to the land. The terrain accumulates narratives, gestures, and beliefs where myth and reality intertwine. Certain forms, faces in stone, wind-bent branches, fragments of ruins, evoke archaic figures and forgotten divinities, as if a diffuse Mediterranean mythology still inhabits the material world. The island becomes a palimpsest, a space where visible and invisible histories coexist, echo, and resonate.

Through photography, I explore the subtle correspondences between body, place, and memory. Human silhouettes, often barely visible, emerge from or dissolve into the landscape, while objects, textures, and forms become fragments of an invisible archive. The images reveal how memory persists beyond archives, in shapes, silences, and atmospheres. The territory transforms into a living narrative, where personal and collective histories intertwine, and where the landscape itself embodies human presence.

Isula Anima, literally “the animated island” or “the soul of the island,” is a meditation on heritage as a living, mutable presence. It investigates how history, myth, and memory continue to inhabit landscapes and bodies, shaping our understanding of ancestry and place. The project invites the viewer to experience the island as a living witness, where memory, myth, and the human body converge, and where the land itself assumes human forms.