Camilla Marrese, Gabriele Chiapparini, Thinking like an Island, 2024

The Island is distant in the Mediterranean sea, and 675 metres in height. It’s inhabited by an uncertain number of 30 to 60 people, year-round, with no hospital, no cars, no priests or police. Some islanders never consider leaving while others tried, only to return to their lives in the remote bubble. There are untold stories, complex family trees, and historical lore surrounding the community existing on loaves of hallucinogenic-laced bread.

Bound into an ‘unconventional’ book structure, Thinking like an Island reflects on a geographical, social and temporal space, on a system and its moveable logic. Avoiding the typical representation of an island as utopia or dystopia, this work looks at the continuous process of identity construction; clash and coexistence, choice and confinement, innovation and resistance. The experience proves to be stratified, plural and dense; a vertigo of increasing complexity.