Dimensione Isola, a four-handed project

Dimensione Isola, a project by Cristina Sammarco and Roberto Ridi all’Elba

Sometimes I feel like an island.

And living on one intensifies the sensation.

For this reason, the project Dimensione Isola, launched in January 2018 with the Elban photographer Roberto Ridi, has a twofold value for me, on both the artistic and the human level.

The idea emerged by chance, or rather out of a conversation about something Roberto was working on: taking photographs from a bird’s-eye view.

It might seem to be just a change of perspective, but in reality the works I had in front of my eyes gave me more than that: they were nature and colours in the raw, palettes of creation.

Talking, we discovered we had a great deal in common in the way we felt and in our approach to creativity, and out of this came the idea of producing a work together, or rather collaborating on a project of shared creation.

On a theoretical level it was a great idea, but in practice we didn’t really know what to do… The only fixed and clear point was the island. And it was from there that we started. So we immersed ourselves in the deep green of Elba, in its upland, mountainous areas where the sea seems a long way away.

We went to the zone of the mines, known as the area of the laghetti rossi, the ‘red lakes’, with its desert-like appearance… And from there down to the sea, where the island expresses its Mediterranean essence in full.

We explored together, each with our own means, I using watercolours and paper, he the camera. And we came back to the studio with our eyes and hearts sated with colours and sensations to be filtered and shared.

For me it has been an opportunity to experiment with new materials, starting out not just from the reality of nature, but also from its photographic interpretation.

As in the case of the ‘transparencies’ triptych and…

Or of our joint work on plexiglass, which unites a first photographic level with a second level of painting.

The result was an alternation of visions, at times similar, at others contrasting, like a piece of chromatic music whose score stretched out from time to time into thematic walls devoted to a different ‘realm’ of the island.

In the face of all this, however, one piece was still missing: revealing the principle behind it, the process that had animated that artistic dialogue and still sustains it.

And so, notwithstanding our initial timidity and reticence, we decided to entrust our message to experts, to our friends and filmmakers ‘I Licaoni’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_T4JUS_xoE

Out of this has come a work within the work, but the sense is precisely this: a kaleidoscopic opening that conveys the feeling of the island.

The writer and journalist Romano Bavastro has generously agreed to present the project, and has written:

‘Dimensione Isola is a work in progress, a project open in time to new sensations and artistic mixtures that can convey the beauty not just of the island of Elba, but of any island, whether real or imaginary, geographical or part of the inner landscape.’

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