Down by the river
by Daniela Silvestri
portfolio shortlisted call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023', 2023
Category: Anthropology and Territories
“Down by the river” begins in the summer of 2022, one of the hottest in recent years, and continues in 2023, 70 years after Paul Strand settled in Luzzara (Italy) to make the book “Un Paese”, accompanied from the texts by Cesare Zavattini. The project does not want to replicate that experience but represents a personal vision of that territory, a journey in which the imagination of those places relates to the spaces, the atmospheres and, above all, to the river Po. I left Luzzara to extend my exploration to the neighboring towns, in the area called "Terra di Po e dei Gonzaga". A journey along the banks of an increasingly dying river, on the trail of those lands. To meet those metaphysical landscapes that alternate with more earthly landscapes and understand what remains of the identity of those places and of the essence of provincial life. And what remains of that great river Po which has always been an essential presence, reassuring in its normal course, destructive in its multiple floods but now alarming in its absence.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023