Ponente, sull’Aurelia

Mattia Tettoni

This series of photographs is part of an ongoing project investigating the relationship between Aurelia, the territory in which it runs and the entire infrastructure system.

This ever-present element in the Ligurian territory, has been modified by intensive tourist exploitation, but maintained a constant interaction with it. Vittorio Gregotti writes in Sulla Strada/About Roads issue of Casabella, how the road, with its critical and ambiguous presence and uncertain role assumed in relation to its context, cannot be considered a pure element of the landscape.

The Aurelia, a layered object in the Ligurian palimpsest, became a place of sociality where recurring models and types of settlement have been established, at the same time an element capable of redefining the view towards the horizon and the sea.

Since the 1960s, it has symbolised the myth of escape from the city and in some way from the routine oppression. Has a metaphor for holidays, it been the subject of many tourist postcards - as well as natural beauty and other landscape clichés.

From a photographic point of view it looks like an elementary exercise: walking, cycling and driving, trying to describe the associations of objects and materials that compose this complex landscape. This process, inspired by Guido Guidi and his work on Via Emilia, takes place by moving towards a beach, a pier or an open forno, where direct experience and memories try to redefine the idea of ordinary and extraordinary.