The Italian Cultural Institute of London and the Aedificante Association have presented the exhibition Insulae Aqua. Gianni Berengo Gardin and Filippo Romano, conceived and curated by Alessandra Klimciuk, hosted at the Institute’s headquarters until 25 June.
The exhibition offers an opportunity to admire a selection of fifty-nine photographic works (in black and white and colour, many of which are vintage prints), taken in Linosa in 1991 by Gianni Berengo Gardin, a master of international photography, and by Filippo Romano, who is internationally recognised also thanks to two participations in the Venice Biennale, specifically for this project between 2021 and 2024.
The project Insulae Aqua is a tribute to the island, as a fundamental dimension of our being in the world. In its metaphysical and introspective dimension, the island is an image, symbol, dream, and metaphor of our contemporary life.
Beyond the evocative and symbolic value of a distant and secluded place, a discreet and protective space, a remote island amplifies precisely the sense of separation that the sea delineates in a radical experience of spatial and temporal isolation. Such a unique existential condition deserves the creation of a neologism: isolitudine, the existential state of isolation, but also the state of belonging felt by those born on an island.
Insulae Aqua is a visual and narrative journey that speaks of community, identity, territory, and sustainability, in dialogue with the land and the community inhabiting the small, remote, and unspoilt island of Linosa.
The exhibition is accompanied by a volume edited by Alessandra Klimciuk, which contains, in addition to the curator’s essay and reproductions of the exhibited works, texts by Daria Bignardi, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Filippo Romano, and Elisabetta Polezzo.
