Land of Mines
by Fabio Piccioni
portfolio --scartato-- call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2024', 2024
Category: People and Communities
In 2007 i started digging in what’s left by mining exploitation in Sardinia, the
island where i live. Abandoned buildings, deep shafts, dumps, galleries and big
voids are just a few keys of a new transformed landscape. And those voids also
lay inside the thousand people that worked in those mines for most of their life.
They gave their lives to the mines with the hope to create a better future for
their sons and daughters and some of them are still alive. Among these years I
crossed the island several times, I found incredible scenery, I met very special
persons, living witnesses of a world that no longer exists. Along with a
humanistic education I pursued a speleological path in order to reach remote
areas of the underground, the beating heart of every mine. I walked the same
paths that old miners walked, places where history and memory belong to.
It’s a matter of heart, identity, community and preservation of what our
grandfathers and grandmothers did for us.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2024