“I was born and raised in Italy but always felt like a stranger there. It was only once I moved abroad in my early twenties that I really started looking at the place, as I tried to decipher why everything felt so familiar and yet so strange to me. It was then that I resolved to travel through all of the country and draw the opposite of a map: a labyrinth made of slivers of its territory, a book one could walk through and get lost in, another Italy shadowing the one we know.” -Federico Clavarino
In ‘Italia O Italia’, Federico Clavarino constructs a fictional Italy from photographs taken across the peninsula. The images in the book show the remains of the country’s monumental past weighing on the contemporary landscape, signalling inertia and inability to move on from a glorious past.
Clavarino had been living abroad and when he returned to Italy he experienced the country with a new perspective. Over a period of 5-years he photographed in towns and cities, working like an architect to find elements he could splice together—corners, streets, archways, blind alleys. His consistent use of light, colour and awkward angles created a uniformity amongst the different urban landscapes. He sequenced and edited the photographs to create a labyrinth of different cities and towns for the viewer to journey through.
