© Nicola di Giorgio from the series 'Calcestruzzo (Concrete)'

The question of land consumption is re-emerging in the public debate in an increasingly pressing manner, primarily due to the intensification of problems: the hydrogeological instability, the reduction of land for agriculture, the removal of coasts, and green space, with all the repercussions on both flora and fauna. The problem in Italy, which started in the 1960s with the economic boom, is a consequence of various needs. Those related to population growth, those determined by economic development, therefore factories and industries, or consumption such as the construction of large shopping malls; and the widespread motorization, with the consequent increase in the demand for roads and parking lots. 
Despite the evidence, increasingly frequent and dramatic disasters, and the attempts of intervention by the European Commission to direct policies towards the territories, Italy keeps eating soil, and today, fueled by great infrastructure, real estate speculations, and ineffective planning, the problem grows and becomes drama. Nicola, looking at your works, it is clear that your research focuses on humanity's footprint on the world. In your recent work 'Calcestruzzo (Concrete)', you focus on the most obvious sign, that of overbuilding.

Nicola di Giorgio (NDG) I consider my work out of the canons of pure documentation. Each of my photographs is a climb towards knowledge, a stance as an author and citizen. In 2018 I photographed the writing 'GOD' hidden by an empty plastic pot inside a massive public housing building in Palermo. The "Infant Jesus of Prague" association is a reception center steeped in and impatient for its emancipation, born between the ground floor and the houses, designed by the architect as a drying room. After years of neglect and decay, it has become an autonomous space, cooperating with the neighborhood's inhabitants and supporting children and adolescents in their school and life paths.

© Nicola di Giorgio from the series 'Indefinito Spazio. Identità di un posto (Indefinite Space. Identity of a Place)'

The economic boom and depopulation of the countryside, villages, and remote areas. The big factories and the jobs linked to the growing consumption removed the hoe from the hands of the peasants in exchange for workers' overalls and housing in the city. A real ontological revolution. The lands, now uncultivated, have gradually lost their meaning, and the whole countryside has lost values and identities. We know the translation: cement; the misery, the tiring life of the fields did not have many possibilities to impose a fair exchange because once the separation between the inhabitants and their environment was completed, above all, the mutual dependence was interrupted, no one believed that they had to defend the rights of the land against the arrogance of profit. A phenomenon already recounted by Pasolini, who had highlighted all the dangerousness of the narrative of consumption. When administrations sell off parks and valleys and inhabitants to large commercial entities, mumbling the usual lament of employment opportunities. Or, furthermore, those sermons asking villages and regions to devote themselves entirely to tourism - obviously mass tourism. And land consumption is advancing.

NDG: Often across the Italian peninsula, I see a landscape of similarities and oppression on the part of man, such as in the 'Inerti (Inert)' series. With 'SPV,' I reach the Veneto region where it is not an inscription hiding, but the Pedemontana Veneta highway, designed to be buried and hidden from view. The territory of the Veneto is complex and jagged. Widespread urbanization tends to isolate single or groups of houses frequently. The loss or inability to reach one's neighbor, now divided by a huge highway, places the young and the elderly on the same level as the humble and the wealthy. Not to mention the inconvenient topic, certainly for local administrations and citizens, of questionable underground waste, pointed out by head news.

© Nicola di Giorgio from the series 'SPV'

© Nicola di Giorgio from the series 'SPV'

© Nicola di Giorgio from the series 'SPV'

© Nicola di Giorgio from the series 'SPV'

© Nicola di Giorgio from the series 'SPV'

Moving on with your research, I imagine you will have interfaced with different realities, also social. What differences have you encountered in the multiple consciences? Is there a common feeling? Or some thread to follow to build an open and shared discourse.

NDG: For a short time, I lived in the city of Florence; on that occasion, I continued my study on the subject of social housing. The series takes up part of the name of the one in Palermo: 'Indefinito Spazio. The different present'. I meditated on whether to insert the words "different" and "present" within a project that starts from archival research and ends with a consequent territory investigation. Many city realities excited me and emotionally involved me, such as the Isolotto district, originally a land of fields and vegetable gardens. Between 1950 and 1960, INA-Casa transformed, built, and delivered 1450 housing units to the population. The presence and union of citizenship within the neighborhood are powerful. Just think of the historical archive of the Community of the Isolotto. History is a point of reference for covering our short life within a system of rules and our shield and an opportunity to produce another story with more awareness.

I was lucky enough to photograph Don Pino Puglisi's council house, now a House Museum, killed in front of the front door on September 15, 1993, by the Mafia. At every visit he received, for advice or a confession, Don Pino Puglisi always gave back a book, a primary tool for the cultural change of his land. His home was overflowing with books, all signed PPP, even present inside the oven in his kitchen. This little life experience was told to me by some ladies who welcomed me to the House Museum in 2018.

We will see this work exhibited at the MAXXI in Rome, a great satisfaction, but above all, a further sign of how the world of art is increasingly feeling the need to take a stand.

NDG: The highest and most concrete moment of an artist is undoubtedly the "staging" of the work; whether it is a large museum or a small independent space, the goal is to convey the research to the user. Somehow, I take responsibility for my choices, opinions, and weaknesses that I want to be analyzed by the public. The exhibition places must be ring-shaped links for transmission, reception, and interchange with the population.
When the MAXXI in Rome, for the Graziadei Prize, informed me that the 'Calcestruzzo (Concrete)' exhibition, scheduled for June 15, will be set up in Zaha Hadid's "Study Room" of the Archives Center, I thought it couldn't be a better place. Here researchers, architects, engineers, and scholars from all over the world can analyze the past to communicate with the future.

© Nicola di Giorgio from the series 'Calcestruzzo (Concrete)'

© Nicola di Giorgio from the series 'Calcestruzzo (Concrete)'

© Nicola di Giorgio from the series 'Calcestruzzo (Concrete)'

This research is not just photography but something between the archive and the observatory. It is a decidedly more dynamic idea both in the means and the interpretation it makes of the territories. It would be a contribution that would find its most important place, perhaps right outside the studio environments and large exhibitions, but how to get out of the museums and reach the inhabitants? What dialogue do you think works like yours can initiate?

NDG: 'Calcestruzzo (Concrete)' is a decisive moment in my journey as a researcher and observer of the anthropized landscape. I would say a moment of breaking from the neuralgic and monocular obsession of one's artistic work, expanding the horizon towards other languages, such as sculpture, or drawing on and subtracting purposeful elements from the past. In the series 'Indefinito Spazio. Identità di un posto (Indefinite Space. Identity of a Place)', the first act I decided to perform, as a landscape scholar, is to invade the private space of the house, placing myself inside the architecture, thus reaching the zero point: the neutral landscape, the one that stands as a trench between the external landscape, devoid of history and reference points, and the tenuous and utopian landscape of the inhabitant.

© Nicola di Giorgio from the series 'Indefinito Spazio. Identità di un posto (Indefinite Space. Identity of a Place)'

Today, when we are on the threshold of a catastrophe, on whose actual dimensions we can be slightly wrong, some scientists remind us that in reality, it is not the planet Earth in danger, but life as we know it today and above all necessary for our survival. All in all, a mass extinction would not be new; in your work 'Credimi siamo niente, dei miseri ruscelli senza fonte (Believe me we are nothing, miserable streams without source)' I feel this awareness strongly.

NDG: 'Credimi siamo niente, dei miseri ruscelli senza fonte (Believe me we are nothing, miserable streams without source)' develops in the Marche region from the meeting of three crucial lines of communication: the Candigliano river, which flows into the Metauro river, and the Via Flaminia. The title is a tribute, before his recent death, to the immense figure of Franco Battiato, who in 1988 released his fifteenth album entitled "Physiognomy." Physiognomy is a pseudoscientific discipline that claims to deduce the psychological and moral characteristics of a person from his physical appearance through physiognomy. The series is a lasting relationship between water, which generates life, and the persistent constructiveness of nature. A silent and rational research attempts to outline the identikit of the human being, an accomplice and author of the constant and massive changes that anguish the national territory.
In this regard, I quote Pier Paolo Pasolini from the volume Lutheran Letters of 1976: "Italy - and not only the Italy of the Palace and of power - is a ridiculous and sinister country: its powerful are comic masks, vaguely stained with blood: «Contaminations» between Molière and Grand Guignol. But Italian citizens are no less. I saw them, I saw them in crowds on August 15th. They were the image of the most insolent frenzy. They made such a commitment to have fun at all costs, that they seemed to be in a state of "raptus": it was difficult not to consider them despicable or in any case guilty unconscious." (translation by the redaction).

© Nicola di Giorgio from the series ''Credimi siamo niente, dei miseri ruscelli senza fonte (Believe me we are nothing, miserable streams without source)'

© Nicola di Giorgio from the series ''Credimi siamo niente, dei miseri ruscelli senza fonte (Believe me we are nothing, miserable streams without source)'

About your education journey, how much influence does it have on your choices and your results?

NDG: Artistic training is essential for those who think they can and want to communicate something to others. The words of one of my professors come back to me: "Concentrating your gaze is a way to concentrate your thoughts." Training places are the center of the exchange between past and future generations. Italian compulsory schooling is suffocating by its nature; it shuts down and freezes the potential of the new generations. Fortunately, the Academies of Fine Arts and the ISIA are free, productive, and atmospheric places. A few years ago, at the beginning of his lesson, another professor told us: "I can teach you the technique, but I can't pass on the sensitivity." I have to thank the institutions I attended very much because, for better or for worse, they have always pushed me to believe, strengthen and make my research grow.

You started from the mountains. The work 'Trasposizione d'inverno (Winter Transposition)' seems to be the last breath of fresh air before heading headlong into the noisy world of men. Do you ever think about going back?

NDG: 'Trasposizione d'inverno (Winter Transposition)' is my spaceship for salvation, my plan B, my raft in the middle of a stormy ocean, or as Franco Battiato sang "my pair of wings" to "abandon the planet". The series is a pre-visualization of the despair and anguish of inhabiting the society of this planet. Transposition of winter is an intimate and collective place of solitude, quoting Umberto Eco: "I belong to a lost generation, and I find myself only when I witness the solitude of my fellow men in company". A path by its definition is a shift from place to place, the further I travel the more I am aware that habits are not part of my chromosomes.

© Nicola di Giorgio from the series 'Trasposizione d'inverno (Winter Transposition)'

Nicola di Giorgio (website)