Underlying
Sottotraccia
(2019 / 2024)
eng · ita
Insel, insula, isola, island – words that refer to a secret, something separate and self-contained.
Ernst Jünger, Am Sarazenenturm, 1955
A perfect symmetry exists that is created in the contrast between the reflected light of Asinara and the darkness of the coalfields of Sulcis. In this respect, it is natural to observe how the two destinations of this visual journey by Pino Musi coincide with the very components of photography, in a perfect balance of Asinara-white and Sulcis-black, between the dazzling images of the prison and certain Piranesi-like views of the Iglesiente area. Light and darkness are thus reunited in that miracle that nobody has perhaps depicted as well as the American novelist Cormac McCarthy, when he glimpsed in photography all past and future dreams “cauterized” within the camera’s closet. This is the verb that I have sought so long, derived from Greek and then Latin, and meaning “to burn or sear with a hot iron”. The origin of the photograph corresponds precisely to a burn, in the darkness of a wound that is born of light.
The series of pictures of Sulcis commences with two mysterious propylaea, the stumps of a building devoured by time, before unfolding in greater detail in the story of a fierce struggle between concrete, iron and rock. Despite the disaster effected by the passage of time, some terse, geometric façades continue to emanate a stubborn, residual, metaphysical harmony derived from their proportions rather than their materials. But what has happened to humankind in all of this? This is a legitimate question. It is no coincidence that this uninhabited world, which seems to have been corroded by a secret disease, brings to mind Dissipatio H.G. (an acronym standing for humani generis), a novel by Giudo Morselli that conjectured the disappearance of the human race, published in 1977, a few months before the author’s suicide. Based on a single survivor, the story depicts a world in which the deserted streets are gradually covered by a light layer of soil, allowing the growth of wild plants, buttercups and chicory…which happens to be one of Musi’s chosen subjects.
The book effectively recounts the outcome of a tormented metamorphosis that took place at the two ends of the island, both on the open horizon and in the mountains eroded by the miners, which has seen nature return to establish itself over very different constructions. Following the great spurt in growth that took place in Sardinia from the time of the Industrial Revolution, the structures built on Asinara and on Sulcis were gradually deserted and became uninhabited, sinking into a state of total neglect.
In this respect, we can say that an attentive traveller like Ernst Jünger was doubly right when he wrote in Am Sarazenenturm: “The golden age of the island was prehistorical and not historical” and “Sardinia’s destiny is to stand on the sidelines”. Pino Musi’s photographs reveal how this basic truth has received further, bleak confirmation in recent years. We now need to add another statement to the traditional one of Sardinia’s “ontological” isolation proposed by the German writer, and namely that of its post-historical isolation (albeit obviously partial). In other words, not only has Sardinia long remained on the side-lines: even after having been fed into the process of modernity, we could say that it has ended up returning to its primitive state, as if by an irresistible inertia, as shown by the modern ruins of Asinara and Sulcis.
The fact is, it seems that, having known Progress, this region retreated from it, returning to the bed of its mythical, original time. Now forgotten, the prisons and the mines photographed here mark an unprecedented verbal time, able to introduce new forms of inflection into our grammar, something like a “past-future”, or a “future-that-returns-to-the-past”. This is effectively shown by certain touching ruins resembling natural formations, which are so corroded that they create the impression of slipping slowly from architecture into geology, almost as if they have been reabsorbed by the ground.
For some of the island’s inhabitants, prisons and mines are two outside presences, the expressions of age-old practices, based on plunder and conquest, and are thus difficult to see through the eyes of a “continental” – who cannot, however, ignore the many injustices perpetrated by the Italian state here, commencing with the establishment of military bases. As for the irresponsible abandonment into which the buildings of Asinara and Sulcis have fallen, the blame should be shared: indeed, the usual colonialist attitude of the “invader” should be flanked by the excessively remissive one of the inhabitants, all too ready to delegate the future of their land, first to the king of monarchist Italy, and subsequently to the president of the Republic. Consequently, without a vision of autonomous growth, Sardinia still seems to wish to entrust itself stubbornly “to a messiah that will never come”. Sottotraccia also recounts this story, inviting us to take a look at this region capable of revealing its “heartbeat” over the centuries: the alternating systole and diastole produced during the different phases of anthropization and emptying, settlement and abandonment, in an area that jealously and insularly continues to defend “something separate and self-contained”.
Valerio Magrelli
related book:
Sottotraccia
