Sopravvivono alle spiagge
by Francesco Conti
portfolio shortlisted call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2025', 2025
Category: Nature, Environment and Perspectives
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.
Review by URBANAUTICA
Francesco Conti’s Sopravvivono alle Spiagge inhabits this tension between the imperceptible and the catastrophic. Through the apparent promise of the camera to arrest time, Conti attempts to hold on to landscapes that are already slipping away. Yet his photographs are not simply documents of environmental transformation. They form a melancholic sequence of views, suspended somewhere between observation and contemplation, where the landscape acquires an almost sublime quality. The apparent stillness of the images seems to contradict the violence of the processes they describe.
This contradiction is central to the project’s appeal. Conti conceives his research as both a visual and an affective archive, bringing together the documentary impulse inherent in photography and a more intimate, sentimental register. His gaze is analytical in its attention to the coastline, but the images also produce a kind of lyricism, almost like a soundtrack accompanying the disappearance of these places. Soft light, quiet atmospheres, and seemingly placid scenes establish a subtle counterpoint to the dramatic prospect of environmental loss. The photographs do not illustrate catastrophe; they allow us to sense its inevitability.
There is something distinctly Romantic in this posture: the melancholy of an observer who looks at the world while knowing that everything is destined, in one way or another, to disappear. As Conti suggests, the project concerns not only beaches, but “the erosion of personal geographies, emotional maps, and intimate territories.” The threatened coastline becomes a metaphor for the fragility of human certainties, for the distance between remembered places and their present reality.
Rooted in the landscapes of Salento, the work also evokes a certain fatalism, perhaps even a culturally inflected disposition towards loss, in which disappearance is acknowledged with a mixture of resignation and tenderness. Ultimately, Sopravvivono alle Spiagge reminds us that what erodes is never merely land. It is also the fragile geography through which we have learned to inhabit the world.