Inner Sea (on-going)

Inner Sea recounts the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, attempting to adopt multiple perspectives: western and eastern, southern and northern; of conflict, negotiation, and encounter. A sea that is conquest and adventure, but also a sea through which to resist and hope.

The Mediterranean Sea is something that is ‘ours’: a safe place, our possession, always available for our vacations; tanning and relaxation. We see the Mediterranean as the most beautiful sea of all: close and sometimes exotic; Latin and European. We know that this sea has a long history, a continuous succession of encounters and ‘clashes’ of civilizations. But we also know that we reside on the ‘modern’ shore of this ‘geography’; and this gives us relief.

But that relief is potentially shaken when we meet someone who gives us the perception of being different from us; when we hear that there are violent protests in Libya; when the Palestinian question becomes bloody again, when a boat full of migrants capsizes off the island of Lampedusa.

We change channels on TV or scroll through Instagram and there it is again, ‘slow living’, beaches and parties on Greek islands overrun by tourists: certain contradictions emerge and we end up oscillating between a Homeric-idyllic past and the sclerosis of the present. We feel we lack the tools to understand this world, where southern Europe is also the Near East; North Africa is Latin America and the Atlantic Ocean is as big as Asia. Some authors, such as Fernand Braudel, Albert Camus, Predrag Matvejevic, and Franco Cassano, essayist of ‘Pensiero Meridiano’, have studied and criticized this ‘geography’. On the other hand, Arab, North African, and Turkish authors have had their say over the centuries, gradually perceiving the Mediterranean as a defensive barrier against European conquest. Their voices are also quoted.

Through these photographs, I attempt to offer a personal reflection on this journey, which is intended to be undertaken over the long term and to touch on numerous places on both coasts of the Mediterranean.