atlante italiano 007

	1st classified Marcello Mariana A journey across the entire alpine arch at the purpose of documenting its sublime magnificence and its violent contradictions. A place where often nature, with its solemnity and elegance, is still the absolute star; but also a place where it is often at risk of succumbing to human impetuosity, limiting itself, for this reason, to “being the setting”. I decided to photograph the majesty of the contemporary alpine landscape, its immanence and transcendental nature, its absolutes and contingencies, trying nevertheless to harmonize it with the intervention and the presence of modernity. Factors that can be defined “of disorder”, but which currently appear so frequently in the original natural landscape that they become, somehow, integral parts of it, even acquiring a certain beauty, on occasion.
	motivation For having chosen the natural landscape as a work topic and having made the problematic relationship between persons and the environment clear through a minimal degree staging code.
	2nd classified Marcello Galvani The pictures where taken in the Massolombarda (RA) area. The method is that of automatic writing; collecting what is encountered and trying to extract a visual narrative, transferred on paper, made of cross-references between parts, from it. The photographs must be read in the indicated sequence. The Italian landscape (excellent, abandoned, combed, “at risk”, tourist) appears various and unpredictable and offers the opportunity to be surprised of the way certain coloured snapshots come out.
	motivation For the ability to deal with a minor landscape, using a light and controlled narrative register, very close to the “naturalness” of the glimpse.
	3rd classified Michele Cera Bari, southern cost For years southern Italy’s costal areas were, and, to some extent, still are devastated by the assault of intensive, at times illegal, housing. This is the case of the southern Bari littoral where, a few hundreds of metres from the site which used to house the Punta Perotti eco-monster, a number of small illegal buildings, abandoned by their owners several gears ago, are still present. Nevertheless, these buildings are currently used by immigrants, possibly illegal, who employ them as precarious lodgings. For this reason I wanted to create a dialectic, in the images I would present, between the external landscape, that is in the light of the sun and is, for this reason, known to the public at large, and the interiors of those buildings, hidden and unknown, with their improvised furniture and beds. An illegal and neglected landscape, becomes a fragile and vulnerable landscape as well; a landscape “rejected” and removed from the city, precisely like the people that furtively inhabit it.
	motivation For the delicacy and absence of rhetoric in creating a dialogue between the interpretation of the landscape and the narrative of a socially topical theme.

finalists

	Fabio Barile
	Ex- Novo is a photographic project on the re-qualification of the former FIAT area at Novoli in Florence, a simple pretext to carry out a personal research on the “pre-history” of places. It’s paradoxical to look for the genius loci in a construction yard; nonetheless, by exercising the glance, it’s possible to capture the dialectic between every individual element and the whole, to listen at things while they exist and change; they are things which don’t happen: minimal findings, sentinels of the ephemeral captured in their simple existence. Even the portrayed persons determine the soul of the place, with their expressions and postures, signing it with visible and invisible marks. By following the mirage of representation, a nucleus which denies itself not only to comprehension, but also to perception, is touched. What is noticed of a presence, becomes a question, a mystery… but and absolutely ordinary mystery. In the end, what photography reveals is that there are things which can never be revealed.
	Luca Casonato
	Beautiful Cities “In a bourgeois context, newly built, excellent investment, small villa with garden: for sale”. The suburbs of many Italian cities have been colonized by row houses, equipped with small green spaces, most of which lack architectonic value. Despite this, the surrounding spaces enjoy some interesting peculiarities generated by the same laws that were used to lower their design and construction costs. Thus, if, on one hand, seriality, repetition, parallelism, reflection often lead to anonymous buildings, on the other, they also generate very orderly, rigorous, almost clear spaces. Unexpectedly the laws which allow to minimize design commitment and implementation costs generate crystalline, clean, rigorous spaces. I set out to investigate such spaces, a few of the many landscapes of the real estate market, which collective imagination tends to consider Beautiful Cities.
	Federico Covre
	But there’s nothing here! The proposed images are an extract from a larger research project regarding the Alps which intends to observe the environmental changes of the Alpine landscape that have occurred due to the development related to the processes of industrialization, tourism and urban expansion. In this limited series of photographs I concentrated on the places that can be defined “at the margins”, between the planes and the mountainous territories of the Alps, in the piedmont strip between Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia, contained at the west by the Garda Lake and at the east by the Tagliamento River. With respect to the requirements of the call, I strongly questioned myself on how to define “landscape risk”. It’s hard to express a single possible interpretation, as hard as finding a sole definition of landscape. Because landscape itself is produced by the interpretation of territory and, consequently, it has a typically physical character, but, at the same time, it is also produced by our choices and judgements of value regarding it, and, therefore, by a character that cannot be irrespective of the point of view that expresses it, in itself. Perhaps the landscape at risk, is the incongruous, the landscape “out of place”? Once again, it becomes important to ask ourselves what we intend with the term “incongruous” and to try to understand how much of all this intervenes with the idea of ecologic-environmental incompatibility, or is principally related with the topics of landscape perception. Questions which lead to other questions… The photographic camera cannot give answers to all this, but through it we are able to register the traces that economic, social and political structures deposit in the environment. Nevertheless, we can go beyond this if we consider, as Antonello Frongia writes, that “photography can have an ethical or even a political role in learning to see the potentialities of minor, non monumental, even vernacular landscapes”. At the same time, these images wish to reflect on places with the glance that’s necessary to comprehend the landscape’s changes and, therefore, those inside us, and on the ways of living the landscape itself. As in my previous projects, I was principally involved in the contemplation of the landscape, preferring to observe the people immersed in the activity of being, instead of dealing with what they were looking at. Documenting the places where experience is exercised, through the physical space where memory moves, becomes important, not in order to avoid re-composing ideal fortunate environments of pre-industrial landscapes or to condemn what our society itself has conceived, but to activate forms of interpretation capable of assimilating the changes of the city that is contemporary to us. Only then, and perhaps only implicitly, we will be able to understand the risks of the landscape and pose the questions which interest our contemporary territories, without falling in the obvious, in the already heard, in the easily intuitable.

	Simone Donati /Rocco Rorardelli /Michele Borzoni
	Italian Earthquakes 1968-2002 A geographical investigation of the most important seismic events of the last 40 years, that signed the lives of thousands of people in our Country in an indelible way. Belice - 15 gennaio ‘68 Un sisma sconvolge nella notte la Valle del Belice, distruggendo interamente 6 paesi e causando 500 morti e 98000 senzatetto, 12000 dei quali non hanno ancora fatto ritorno a casa. Irpinia and Basilicata - 23 November ’80 During the evening a tremor disfigured Irpinia and Basilicata, causing 2735 deaths and 8850 injuries. Up to now, only one of the approximately 150 struck villages has concluded reconstruction. Umbria and Marche - 26 September ’97 A sequence of tremors struck dozens of mountain municipalities between Umbria and Marche, but media attention was concentrated on the basilica of Assisi. Santa Venerina - 29 October ’02 A seism shook Santa Venerina, at the slopes of the Etna, but two days later the Sicilian seism was quickly forgotten due to the Molise tragedy. San Giuliano di Puglia - 31 October ’02 At 11.32 a tremor hit the border between Molise and Apulia, causing the collapse of a single building, the Francesco Jovine school. 27 children and one teacher lost their lives.
	Cesare Fabbri
	Travel journals The photographs chosen for this sequence were taken north of Ravenna, mostly along the Romea 309 state road: a road of large communication, but not a high-speed traffic route, lapped by the Natural Park of the Delta of the Po in a large portion of its path and enclosed by the two industrial areas of Porto Marghera (VE) and Porto S. Vitale (RA) at its extremities. I tried to touch all five themes of the call in this way, without separating, but by permeating them, as in the similar state of fragmentation, in which the diffused city of the Padana Plane finds itself.
	Alberto Giuliani
	Mafialand The course of history nearly always leaves traces of itself on the territory. Instead, at times, it is the surrounding environment which conditions the occurrence of facts. What is striking when crossing the lands of Mafia is that this cause-effect relationship disappears, both in places and in collective memory. For more than four centuries the history of Sicily and of the whole of Italy were signed by bloodsheds that didn’t seem to leave wounds on the ground. And the reason of the excellent health that the criminal systems of our Country enjoy is precisely there, in their absolute and shared normality. Thus, when travelling through the places of mafia that have characterized history’s recent years, one discovers that in reality the combination environment-facts has generated a third painful element: silence.

	Claudio Gobbi
	Excellence and loss: the case of Carlo Mollino These images represent a brief incursion in the visionary world of the Turinese architect Carlo Mollino divided in two parts, that dialogue with each other. On one hand, the black & white pictures of the Turin Horse Racing Society taken by Molino himself, a masterpiece building which doesn’t exist anymore because it was blindly demolished during the ‘60s, and, on the other, the coloured pictures I took at the premises of the only surviving internals carried out by the designer, whose preservation is more than ever relevant today, following the recent dismantling of the RAI auditorium created by him. The final result of this work, between memory and topicality, intends to also be a dialogue between the languages of photography, between documentation and fiction, the glance of the real and the taste for make belief. An imagining the realization between internal and external world through images, especially in its linkage between space and time, a dimension which the designer was particularly fond of.
	Alessandro Imbriaco
	Utopia - #01 the house Desire requires a place where to dock, it needs to build boundaries in order to be recognized as such. That place is UTOPIA and its borders become the socially most recognized expectations of a civilization at the peak of its development, the ones listed everyday in the pages of the horoscope: home, health, work, love. This project intends to thoroughly examine the constructions of desire in its continuous attempt to be embodied. This first part, concentrated on the aspiration of possessing a house - steeped with an entire rhetorical imaginative world, according to which the house itself transfigures into an imaginary (utopian) place where other dreams can be brought to life (a family, a Christmas dinner, a high tech position) - is realized by placing the pictures of Eastern Rome’s rising suburbs (an allegory of the utopian expansion of a community and of its pioneering restlessness of founding happiness on virgin land) next to written texts extracted from neighbourhood blogs, where the future inhabitants of these suburbs try to give body and voice to the dimension of their expectations (the blogosphere itself thus becoming the last dock of fantasy, the merciless objective correlative of the ephemeral inconsistency of endless ready-made dreams). This is the first chapter of a work that will be constituted of four other chapters, developed with the same modality of interaction between pictures and blog texts concentrated on the topics of health, work and love.
	Marco Lachi
	Pratolino (Florence) - former “Banti” sanatorium An important and prestigious medical site of the 30’s, a construction with absolutely modern building characteristics donated to the National Fascist Institute of Social Security (INFPS) by princess Demidoff in 1935, it was the shelter for Somali asylum applicants in 2004, and is currently empty! I returned to this same place for approximately a year in different moments and for different reasons. Then I started attending it assiduously. During the last months I could see it changing: small changes although it was abandoned. Objects which had become familiar were placed in different spots or were no longer there. At a certain point my attendances were proportional to the perceived changes: the need had become that of registering them before loosing their sight.

Francesca Lazzarini

Abusiveness
The work is composed of 7 photographs 60x60 and a story entitled Abusiveness. The abusiveness to which the pictures refer to is not that of great building speculations, of costal and alpine eco-monsters, but to a phenomenon which exploded in city suburbs during the post-war period, born as an emergency - even if illegal - response to the need of shelter of the poorest layers of the urban migrated population. The text and images create a short circuit between past and present housing emergencies: between the visual disorder of a landscape lacking building regulations and the difficulty of facing the current life conditions, dictated by the social-economic system. Something which sarcastically renders a landscape like this, in addition to being familiar, almost desirable.

Marco Miglio

The landscape of neglect in Val Bordera
After a careful reading of the contest’s call, I thought it would be interesting to exploit the project as
an enquiry aimed at bringing out how citizens, and not only photographers, perceive their life environment.
I invited the Valborderians to indicate an example of landscape of excellence and an example of critical
landscape situation, according to the binary scheme proposed by the contest. An interesting variety of glances
and opinions resulted from this. I made these “latent” thoughts clear and “translated” the complexity of their
reactions into images, which go well beyond the polarity between quality and risk, respectively expressed
by the balance between nature and spontaneous rural architecture and the threat of diffused, inhomogeneous
and unaware urbanization. Realized in medium size format.

Lorenzo Vitturi

On the border
The signs left from the Cold War in Italy are made evident by a poorly known construction, financed by NATO,
of an articulate defensive system on the north-eastern border. This research, archaeological and photographical
at the same time, intends to shed light on the effects of the gradual dismantling, subsequent to the fall of the
USSR, of this defensive line. A demilitarization that rendered the entire area a desolate battlefield, abandoned
since 1996, and still awaiting concrete re-conversion. The disused facilities, apparently pacific symbols
of the end of that tense period, reveal their isolation to the course of time, and due to the lack of any renovation
intent, instead, continue to account of the desolation generated by war.