Sopravvivono alle spiagge

A long-term analogue photographic project exploring coastal erosion, fragmented memory, and shifting identities along the Salento peninsula, through contemporary images, vernacular archives, postcards, and personal geographies.

Sopravvivono alle Spiagge – An Archipelago of Memory and Erosion

Sopravvivono alle Spiagge is an ongoing long-term photographic project developed since 2022 along the coastline of Salento, in southern Italy, facing the Mediterranean basin. Entirely produced through medium and large-format analogue photography, the work investigates coastal erosion not simply as an environmental phenomenon, but as a gradual fragmentation of landscape, memory, and identity.

The project emerged from a personal return to the beaches of my adolescence after years spent living elsewhere. Revisiting these places revealed a geography profoundly altered by erosion, tourism, climate instability, and decades of intensive coastal transformation. Many of these places felt simultaneously intimate and estranged, as if memory and geography no longer fully coincided. Familiar places had become estranged territories: interrupted, consumed, or emotionally unrecognizable. In this sense, the coastline began to appear less as a continuous geography than as an emotional archipelago composed of isolated fragments, absences, and unstable memories.

Rather than focusing on spectacular events or direct reportage, the work unfolds through repetition, proximity, and duration. Returning continuously to the same locations, the photographs observe the coast as a liminal territory where geological time, human presence, and personal memory overlap and slowly reshape one another. Winter became the privileged temporal condition of the work: an emptied landscape where the coastline revealed itself beyond tourism and seasonal occupation.

Alongside the contemporary photographic work, the project incorporates an evolving vernacular archive composed of found postcards, donated family photographs, documents, and local testimonies. These materials function not as illustrations, but as temporal devices capable of activating emotional and historical readings of the territory. Travelled postcards, marked by postal dates and traces of circulation, become fragments of time through which vanished landscapes survive as dispersed visual memories.

The installation is conceived as a constellation of contemporary photographs and archival elements. Framed analogue prints coexist with vernacular materials presented as smaller pinned images and archival fragments, creating a fragmented visual structure where multiple temporalities and forms of belonging intersect.

The project also dialogues with my broader long-term research on Southern Italian landscapes developed since 2009, including Topografia Meridiana — inspired by the thought of Franco Cassano — and other works investigating tourism, environmental transformation, wildfires, and historical memory in the Mediterranean context. More recently, part of my work was included in a collective photographic campaign on the Arneo territory developed together with photographers including Guido Guidi, within a broader reflection on Southern Italian landscape and historical memory.

Through erosion, disappearance, and fragmented memory, Sopravvivono alle Spiagge reflects on how territories shaped by climate crisis and mass tourism struggle to preserve continuity with their own past, questioning what survives when places no longer coincide with the memories attached to them.