Vertical Horizon: Geologies of Mobility along the Coast

Abstract

The contribution presents the outcomes of a three-year theoretical and practice-based research developed along the Tyrrhenian coast of Calabria, stemming from the verbal-photographic series "Orizzonte" (2025). The project focuses on the idea of departure in a liminal landscape on the border between land and sea, where leaving is a historical and common condition, approaching movement as both a geological process and an intimate human experience. The presentation opens with a projection of "Orizzonte" accompanied by a performative reading, and then retraces the research that led to the creation of the series. "Orizzonte" is a photographic fabulation of 36 images that approaches landscape as a vertical archive, moving between excavated spaces, the horizon line, and emerged lands. The photographs show sand quarries that were once seabeds and today preserve fossils, caves carved along maritime routes, a rock-hewn church built as an ex-voto by sailors, the volcanoes Stromboli and Etna, and the industrial port of Gioia Tauro, traversed by global flows of goods. Some words by the Venetian writer Giuseppe Berto — who lived along this coast — are traced in marker on the photographs. They recount his journey across the peninsula, in a reflection on limits that ends with him gazing at the lights on the Sicilian coast. The presentation closes with a liminal image: the lights of the industrial port of Gioia Tauro photographed at night from the hinterland. This photograph crystallises the friction between territorial conservation and development policies, geological past and industrial present, nostalgic vision and aspiration towards progress — tensions that still characterise the debate around the coast today, and open towards future research.