Accademia di Belle Arti di Palermo, 2020
Through images by students and established photographers, the research project maps the edges of the city, presenting the current state of the outskirts and calling for action to remedy their decay. A frontier territory, both included in and excluded from the urban sphere, the outskirts have always remained on the threshold between two worlds. Taking stock of this situation and issuing a call to action is the photographic project Palermo/Periferie, a multi-voiced book published by the Accademia di Belle Arti di Palermo.
The project, conceived and curated by Sandro Scalia with introductory texts by Roberta Valtorta and Maia Rosa Mancuso, is the result of four years of research involving some 200 students of the Academy alongside photographers such as Gabriele Basilico, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Guido Guidi, Stefan Koppelkamm, Daniela Tartaglia, Sebastiano Raimondo and the curator Sandro Scalia.
In the selected images, the outskirts of Palermo – in both their man-made and their wild landscapes – become an occasion for a broader reflection on the concept of limit and for tracing the margins of the contemporary city. The approach is twofold: on the one hand, that of disappearance, in which the images stand as a last look at the world, from desertified spaces to inhabitants portrayed as survivors; on the other, the approach of revelation, voicing wonder at small things and at a new way of inhabiting a land that is desolate only in appearance and in reality steeped in history and culture.
The photography of Palermo/Periferie thus becomes, as the curator and photographer Sandro Scalia has described it, “a cure for the city”, one that can serve citizens as a longing for a lost order, towards beauty and legality. A photography that not only presents the current state of the outskirts but acts as a mending of their time and space, healing their decay and making up for the lack of a sense of belonging.
[source: DOMUS]
