What does it mean to “reiterate” a city photographically? The title of my new project, Messina Reiterations, may sound puzzling. In its simplest sense, to reiterate means to repeat, to return once again to something that has already occurred. Here, however, the term is used in a stronger sense: as a return to a process already underway, a repetition of repetition. At first glance, this might seem like mere replication. Yet in every reiterative process, whether mechanical or human, biological or synthetic, an epistemic surplus emerges. Something new is learned. The structure of the process, its form, may remain the same, but each time it finds a new instantiation in its concrete occurrence, in the way it comes to be materially realised. Each iteration repeats a form and, in the same gesture, produces a difference. It is identical in structure and distinct in its occurrence. Through this succession of returns, the layered complexity of a reality that no single photographic instant can fix gradually emerges. 

The project began as an attempt to understand Messina, the city in which I now live, through reiterative photographic processes. Routes, subjects, and scenes return over the course of months and years. Each time, they reveal something different, both about themselves and about the people who inhabit them. Hence, Messina Reiterations is, by its very definition, an open project. It resists any arbitrary conclusion and escapes definitive arrangement. But is this not one of photography’s original tensions: the unresolved confrontation between a reality that never ceases to transform itself and an apparatus that immobilises time and its structures?