finis terrae

Finis Terrae is a project started in 2018. I was born and raised in a small town in Southern Italy, in the land called “Salento”. Like most people of the younger generation, I left the land of Salento as soon as I turned eighteen. After five years living in Milan, I started giving in to nostalgia. I used to close my eyes and picture the sea, the waves and the rocks, the wind and the faces: portraits of my family that still lives there. I always felt a connection to my land, even though more than a 1000 km separates us now. I eventually started going back home and taking photographs and collecting forgotten pictures from my family’s photo albums. Finis Terrae is a story about this land which is only lit with life during the
summer. Locals still have a strong and deep connection with their cultural background, making this region a magical place where everything is still and quiet. While at the beginning the whole project was an opportunity to learn more about my roots, after some time I started to research anthropological topics about Southern Italy in general, which in the last decades has been a source of interest for many artists and scholars, like Ernesto De Martino, author of “Sud e Magia” in 1959. I realized how important it is to establish a connection with our personal history, to see how we need to be more aware of our identity as human beings. Through the series it is possible to define a stratification of meanings: starting from a general vision of the place and its apparently uncontaminated landscape, up to a documentation of what the human being has done in this land since the Neolithic era from the rock paintings found inside the cave called Grotta dei Cervi (Porto Badisco, Otranto), capable of illustrating us and making us imagine what the lifestyle of our ancestors could be. Collecting the symbols that still reflect the traditions of the place, Finis Terrae is a tale of a land that hides a magical, spiritual dimension, in which we can review the strong connection with the natural environment, from the waters of the Adriatic Sea to the arid countryside of the hinterland. In the 80s Eugene Filmore Stoermer named our era “Anthropocene”, name that shows us day by day how dominant is our presence on our planet and the urgency to re-establish an empathic contact with it. Finis Terrae tells about a specific area but it wants to spread a universal message about who we are, about how important is to learn from our past and reconsider our presence in this planet.