© Fabio D'Arsié, "Wooden Ships"

Fabio D’Arsiè’s project restores to the traditional river wooden ships, so called "burci" of the Sile River their status as relics of a past that is not so distant in time, yet feels profoundly removed from our present. These ancient cargo boats, once central to a river-based economy that connected territories, goods, and communities, are now silent vessels, slowly being reclaimed by water and vegetation.

Their decay tells the story of the end of a productive system and a working culture tied to the river, displaced by the speed of road transport and new industrial and infrastructural logics. Yet these wrecks are more than mere remnants of what has disappeared: they become a means of questioning our economic and social model, inviting us to reflect on the value of time, our relationship with the land, and the transformations in the ways we live and produce.

© Fabio D'Arsié, "Wooden Ships"

Today, immersed in a nature reserve and surrounded by paths that invite visitors to experience the landscape at a slower pace, the "burci" can be encountered differently. They are no longer simply the ruins of a vanished activity, but presences that open up new ways of engaging with the past.

© Fabio D'Arsié, "Wooden Ships"

D’Arsiè’s work thus reminds us how narrow the distance can be between what we consider history and what we recognise as the present: very little time has passed, yet the world has already changed radically.

Christoph Corves’s Hebridean Journey unfolds as a photographic and narrative exploration of the islands of Lewis and Harris in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, where isolated chimneys and the remains of abandoned houses stand as silent traces of a history marked by profound economic and social transformations.

© Christoph Corves’s "Hebridean Journey"

While Fabio D’Arsiè’s project tells the story of the end of a river-based economy, here the ruins point to a more painful process: the displacement of local communities from their ancestral lands in favour of landownership interests and economic profitability. The nineteenth-century Highland Clearances, during which entire villages were forcibly emptied to make way for sheep farming and, later, private estates devoted to hunting, bear witness to a model of development in which the value of the land takes precedence over the rights and lives of those who inhabit it. This history is intertwined with British colonialism, emigration, war, and the islands’ progressive impoverishment.

© Christoph Corves’s "Hebridean Journey"

The chimneys thus become unwitting monuments, enduring presences in the landscape that make visible what official history has often relegated to the margins. They are not merely architectural remnants, but testimonies to interrupted lives, dispersed communities, and economic models imposed from outside. Their presence invites us to reflect on how territorial transformations are inseparable from the power relations and political decisions that shape them.

© Christoph Corves’s "Hebridean Journey"

Corves approaches these places through a personal relationship developed over more than forty years of returning to the islands. His stark, high-contrast black-and-white photography intertwines with the stories of local inhabitants, restoring complexity to a landscape that might otherwise appear merely remote and picturesque. The focus thus shifts from the ruins to the people who continue to inhabit these territories, exploring the reasons behind staying, leaving, and returning.

© Christoph Corves’s "Hebridean Journey"

Today, as some communities seek new forms of autonomy and collective life, the Hebrides reveal how landscapes are never immutable. The same lands once emptied for economic reasons sometimes become refuges for those seeking alternatives to the rhythms and models of contemporary society. Hebridean Journey reminds us that transformations can be swift and profound, yet their consequences continue to inhabit both the landscape and the memories of those who move through it.

Jurgen Onland’s 13 Miles introduces a different perception of time and memory. Following Fabio D’Arsiè’s abandoned boats and Christoph Corves’s chimneys, material witnesses to vanished economies and the social transformations that have profoundly shaped their territories, the focus shifts closer to the present. Traces no longer belong solely to a past resurfacing through ruins; they also emerge in the often subtle, everyday marks we continually leave on the places where we live.

© Jurgen Onland’s "13 Miles"

Onland develops his photographic research within a thirteen-mile radius of his home. This clearly defined geographical boundary, explored repeatedly, also becomes a personal measure of the world: a familiar space in which to observe roads, fields, infrastructure, and human interventions, revealing subtle relationships between nature and the ways we organise our surroundings. People are absent from the images, yet their presence is everywhere, inscribed in the forms of the landscape, in practices of maintenance, and in the use and care of places.

© Jurgen Onland’s "13 Miles"

In this work, the territory is not an immobile backdrop, but the outcome of an ongoing negotiation between human needs, productive systems, and natural processes. The images reveal an ambiguous balance in which openness and constraint, protection and exposure coexist without reaching a definitive resolution.

The decision to restrict his gaze to a relatively small area also suggests that we do not need to travel far to discover something new. Unexpected meanings emerge through the repetition of familiar routes, attention to detail, and an intimate knowledge of places.

© Jurgen Onland’s "13 Miles"

13 Miles thus invites us to consider the present as a time that is already generating memory. The traces we leave behind do not need to become ruins to tell the story of how we inhabit the world: they are already part of the landscape, often invisible precisely because they are so close to us. The project reminds us that the future, too, will read in these traces the structures of our society, its priorities, and its relationship with the environment.

Andrea Martino’s Topografie Flegree takes us into a territory where different layers of time coexist and overlap, making it difficult to draw a clear distinction between what belongs to the past and what defines the present. Across the landscapes of Bacoli, Pozzuoli, and Monte di Procida, history, nature, and human intervention have left successive traces, shaping a complex environment in which every transformation builds upon what already exists.

© Andrea Martino’s "Topografie Flegree" 

Martino focuses on ordinary and marginal areas, transitional spaces where urban, rural, and peri-urban environments intersect without ever reaching a definitive balance. It is precisely within these fragmented spaces that the landscape reveals its layered nature: not merely a surface to be observed, but an accumulation of material and cultural sediments, reflecting an ongoing interplay between permanence and change.

© Andrea Martino’s "Topografie Flegree" 

The images thus form a visual map that does more than document the territory; they invite us to question and interpret it. The viewer is encouraged to recognise the simultaneous presence of different temporalities and to read the traces of distinct historical periods as parts of a single, ongoing process.

© Andrea Martino’s "Topografie Flegree"

Time expands, losing its linearity: past and present do not simply follow one another, but coexist, shape one another, and are continually redefined. Topografie Flegree reminds us that inhabiting a landscape means living within this continuity, contributing each day to the formation of its future layers.

© Andrea Martino’s "Topografie Flegree"

Fabio D'Arsié (instagram)

Christoph Corves (website)

Jurgen Onland (website)

Andrea Martino (website)