Project Description
Appia – Work in progress
The journey and the idea of belonging “these” could be the figures of this project, where “journey“ means exploration and “belonging“ the idea of being “natives”.
The inspiration comes from Paolo Rumiz’s book Appia where he talks about the route on foot he, and some of his friends, walked of one of the oldest road in the world, the Italian oldest one, which returns a forgotten, magnificent and at the same time tragic itinerary.
In the book, the writer explicits a wish that is an invitation, too: he hopes that other travelers could walk on this “shockingly abandoned asset“ to take it back before it could be definitely cancelled.
The project is the acceptance of this invitation. Our first answer, we, the “natives” who live this land. Photography is our language and it is through it that we retraced its old southern itinerary following the maps the first contemporary travelers had prepared.
The vision of this street gives a new image, which should belong to us, avoiding the rhetoric of a touristic Puglia and Basilicata or, the idea of a postcard.
An analytical observation of what we met on the way in a personal vision, where every author lowered according to his/her culture and sensibility: an authorial vision.
Our guide was the privilege of living this land, and, our journey calm and meditated, just because we were not “passing“.
And it is just so that good and bad, the political and the religious, archeology, railways, plantations, churches, factories, interchanges and people meet in an unique glance.
Our predecessors’ experiences have really been useful, the travelers, the poets and the writers, too… we have invented nothing but simply, we “looked over again” what was already there.
After all it is just a “walking“ and, almost always, “a walking“ is a collective experience, even if, far apart in time.
