Lampedusa is a rock amidst the sea, a fragment of the African coast that has become closer to the European continent. In recent years, and to a particularly great extent since the start of the Arab revolutions, it has become the destination of an enormous migratory flow. Its name is linked to words such as emergency, refugee, alarm, clandestine, disembarkation. It has become a sort of mirage, of a place of hope, the destination of those who don’t know where to go and see an ideal land upon its coasts. As though the reality has been slightly lost.
This work focusses on Lampedusa as a place that is experienced, inhabited. A welcoming place – an island is never an island – but also one of daily life, of relationships with the sea, with the intense heat, with its slow pace of life, with its solitude and its beauty.