Cosa tutto c’era
Giovanni Emilio Galanello, Francesca Gotti
Giovanni Emilio Galanello was born in Cagliari in 1991. He’s an independent photographer based in Milan. He is represented by the Galerie Kernweine in Stuttgart (DE).
Francesca Gotti was born in Bergamo in 1989. She is an architect and researcher based in Milan. She collaborates with non profit associations for projects of adaptive reuse of spaces meant as common resources and is a PhD student at Politecnico di Milano.
Driven by a common interest in the dynamics of adaptation and mutualism between people and landscape, we have been collaborating as a trans-disciplinary duo on artistic research projects for several years. Among the main shared works, the column "La città rimossa” (The removed city) for the magazine ARK since 2016 (Bergamo), the project "La Sparizione" (Disappearance) for the artistic residence of Edicola 518 in September 2021 (Perugia), the book Gli Stati delle Anime, published in July 2021, and the project “Anonima Plastica”, exhibited at Superattico (Milano) in June 2022.
Sardinia’s borders are ideally located in the European mainland ports on the Mediterranean Sea. The territory of the island does not begin on its sandy shores, but further on, on the opposite coasts of the sea from which it emerges. Its territory is also water and everything that passes through it.
The ferries that leave every day from Genoa, Toulon, Civitavecchia, Piombino, Naples, bring more than 4 million tourists to the island every summer, a number that is constantly growing year after year. 4 million people, traveling in (approximately) 1 million cars, which all get onto the same roads, carrying campers, bicycles, boats, motorbikes, caravans and suitcases on the same beaches and in the same holiday sites.
The ship is a temporary community that unites many different people heading towards a single destination, and returns a cross-section of that population that cyclically migrates to Sardinia from all over Europe, to temporarily rebuild a piece of their domesticity in a more exotic elsewhere than their own home. And the ships carry not only people, but also means of transport, equipment, objects, personal goods, animals, and when they return to the continent they steal tons of sand, shells, rocks (the authorities managed to seize 5 tons of sand stolen in Cagliari during 2015). The ship, a giant that moves territories, temporarily and yet irreversibly, an icon but also a visible and tangible measurer of the transformations of the island's territory.
