Chiudende (from Latin “which has to be closed”), 2016, arises from a Sardinian folk song written in 1820 against a decree that proclaimed the private ownership. The idea of imposing territorial limits deeply changed the way the inhabitants used to feel the space around them. As a consequence they began to build random borders, made of dry stone walls. The song talks about the excitement that came from the closing of the fields, insofar as “if the sky had been on earth they would have closed it too”. The orthophotographs, taken a hundred years after that decree, are the very first attempt to photographically map Sardinia, to close the earth from the sky. I re-photograph and print in the darkroom these sections of the island, which appear irregular and fragmentary: they take us to the contemporary obsession of satellite mapping, which has its roots in early nineteenth-century need of control.
6 gelatin silver prints, 127×158 cm
