The Quadratura dello Stretto serie is inspired by Martin Heidegger’s Geviert and Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Genius loci. It portrays my outlook on
the geo-historical intricate
and centuries-old tissue of the Strait of Messina and its surroundings, far
from today’s inconsistent and defaced existing condition of the area. Each of
the three paintings represent a specific area and its relationship with the
Mediterranean sea. All together they complete an overall
vision of my perception of
the place.
In Quadratura dello Stretto #1
the real morphology
has been deconstructed and reassembled in a new portrayal where the most southern
city of the
Italian peninsula, Reggio Calabria, which is also my hometown, is
attached to land only by a thin steep path. Its unstable
nature fluctuates between the stillness of the ground and its being almost more
integrated with the Sicilian isle rather than with the rest of its own region
thanks to the relationship between the inhabitants of both shores.
The cardinal points of the area are inverted. This anomaly dates back
to the frescoes of the Vatican Gallery of Maps, including the one that depicts
Calabria and Sicily. The period of time ranging from the mid-sixteenth to the
mid-seventeenth century was a key time for Messina because its administrators
were able to take advantage of the bond between sea and land, which is what the ancient
Greeks called thalassa.
First thing they did was to knock down the enceinte. Later, the dialogue between
architectural artifice and essence of places helped establish a tendency to
coastal settlement and to root the idea that those waters were not only bearers
of looming threats from which one had to defend.
«Like
frogs around a pond we have settled down upon the shores of this sea», said Plato about the Greeks living round the Aegean,
just like us, inhabitants of both shores of the Strait, settled our communities
here.
