Alessandra Calò, CTONIO, 2024

In this photographic series realised in the extraordinary setting of the Mediterranean, the artist Alessandra Calò once again attempts – in a poetic and evocative manner – to use the photographic medium as a tool to document the state of places, but above all to dig into memory and appeal to the need to re-establish that ancestral bond that binds man to nature. It is no coincidence that the title of the Ctonio project takes us into a dimension where dialogue with the place cannot be separated from a reflection on identity.

The importance of nature – now more perceptible than ever in the contemporary Mediterranean landscape – leads the artist to question the history behind the infinite expressions it offers to the eye, in an attempt to re-appropriate the spaces generated by man. In the last century, economic policies have encouraged the occupation and exploitation of territories, progressively erasing most of the characteristic features of the Mediterranean area in order to delineate new ones.

The rapid transformations of the territory have produced the current image of a “hollow” landscape, characterised by areas disfigured by the exploitation of the raw material: limestone (calcarenite). Assuming that man has always been accustomed to seeing Nature from the point of view of profit, we realise that he rarely realises the relationship that exists with the complexity of the environment of which he is a part. He is therefore inclined to believe that nature is domesticated by exploiting it for its own benefit for as long as there is profit in it.

At the end of the 1950s, the phenomenon of migration to less hostile places and more profitable work led to the depopulation of vast areas and the population was literally replaced by an important wild presence, which reappropriated space, re-establishing the complex and self-sufficient ecosystem that only the enigmatic law of Nature could re-establish.
The space that was once a ‘crossroads and planning site’ is now regenerated and restores – in the richness of its vegetation – the sedimented memory of those who inhabited it and made it a unique place.