I am a stranger in the lands of the South. I moved to Sicily only a few years ago, after a long journey that took me from Tuscany to live in different countries across Europe. For a long time, I thought I would never return to live in Italy, and I had never considered the possibility of moving to this island.

One of the strongest feelings accompanying my process of adjustment to this new reality is a sense of disorientation: an enveloping, pervasive, heavy, romantic, painful disorientation. Sicily and Calabria are extraordinary places, yet also lands of profound contradictions. They are lands of emigration, and here lies a first contradiction, entirely personal, in my own migration against the current, from north to south. Their cities are gradually losing population, following a process that has already affected dozens of towns and villages scattered across the territory and now almost abandoned. These are lands where the beauty of the landscape and the richness of history and culture collide with social, political, and economic marginalisation, with abandonment by the state, and with the peripheralisation of identities and cultures.

Disorientation requires a guide. Like a traveller lost in a forest, one needs to examine where one is, what lies around, and which possible paths may open ahead. This project follows a similar direction. It seeks to examine the lands of Sicily and Calabria in order to understand them better and to bring their contradictions into view while preserving the tensions among them. This is neither a simple nor an obvious operation. On the one hand, I want to avoid any form of documentary approach focused on marginalisation and peripheralisation. Such a romanticising perspective, in some ways akin to Orientalism, would risk diverting the epistemic aims of this research by presenting the South as picturesque because of its backwardness. On the other hand, I also want to avoid turning the project into a kind of tourist guide. Quite the contrary, I hope that the territorial taxidermisation that has transformed large parts of my native land will never reach these places.

The focal point, then, becomes the concept of inhabited grounds: lands that are inhabited and lived in, altered and abandoned, where human action nevertheless remains an essential and constitutive feature even in its absence. The first phase of the project consists in gathering a collection of photographic fragments of these inhabited grounds across Calabria and Sicily. The fragments are arranged rigorously in alphabetical order, suspending any predetermined metanarrative. Messina, of course, occupies a special place. It is the city that welcomed me a few years ago and therefore occupies a privileged place within this photographic research.

As these fragments accumulate, a new phase will reflect on how they may combine with one another, whether they eventually form a mereological unity, like pieces of a puzzle eventually forming a complete image, or whether that unity is simply a mirage and a projection.