Sopravvivono alle Spiagge is a long-term photographic project that began in 2022 and is still in progress. Developed through an ongoing field practice entirely based on medium format analog film, the project investigates the slow transformation and erosion of the Salento coastline in southern Italy, between Brindisi and Santa Maria di Leuca.
Rather than responding to spectacular or media-driven events, this work is rooted in duration, repetition, and proximity. Coastal erosion here is not approached as an emergency to be documented, but as a temporal process: gradual, layered, often imperceptible, and revealed most clearly through loss. The photographs describe the shoreline as a fragile threshold — a space where geological time, human intervention, and everyday life intersect, erode, and continuously reshape one another.
This selection of fifteen images represents only a small fragment of a much larger body of work developed over several years, involving more than 150 rolls of color negative medium format film and large-format plates. The project unfolds through a sustained return to the same places, observing how landscapes subtly change while remaining inhabited, crossed, used, and remembered.
Alongside the contemporary photographic production, Sopravvivono alle Spiagge is conceived as an evolving visual and affective archive. The research integrates vernacular materials — private photographs, postcards, documents, and personal memories — donated by local inhabitants who have witnessed the disappearance or transformation of places once central to their lives. These materials function not as illustrations, but as devices of temporal comparison and emotional transmission, allowing the present landscape to be read through layers of memory and absence.
Although erosion has recently become a topic of public debate and media attention, the origin of this project is deeply biographical. It stems from the artist’s personal return to the coastal landscapes of his youth — places where formative experiences, friendships, and early encounters once took place. Coming back to these shores years later and finding them altered, fragmented, or partially erased, photography becomes a way to reconnect different temporal versions of the self: the adult observer and the adolescent who once inhabited these spaces when time felt expansive, relationships absolute, and the world small yet total.
In this sense, the project is not only about the disappearance of beaches, but about the erosion of personal geographies, emotional maps, and intimate territories. The images attempt to hold together what is physically vanishing and what survives in memory, proposing photography as a fragile tool to preserve continuity where the landscape no longer guarantees it.
Sopravvivono alle Spiagge is an open-ended archive and a collective invitation: to recognize that when places disappear, it is not only land that is lost, but entire ways of being in the world. To photograph the coast, here, means to resist the disappearance of lived time — and to try, together, to survive the beaches that did not survive us.