Roberto Boccaccino photographs Southern Italy’s fragile landscapes

In the Italian imagery the southern region Basilicata doesn’t easily find a place, because it’s unable to recall any shared visual repertoire around itself. Even when it does, the images called to mind are always vague and untopical, and it seems there is no connection between the observer and the territory. In other words the foundation of the concept of landscape is missing. Potenza 100 has the goal to take up this void with something unprecedented, in order to depict the status the area, as well as the frequent and profound changes ongoing recently.

The work revolves around the story of a real but unknown place, through an unreal but extremely familiar imagery (Sci-Fi, United States, 90ies American movies). Potenza 100 moves across badlands, astronomical observatory, dyke, ghost cities, center for spatial geodesy and oil wells, through an approach that questions methods and languages of contemporary documentary photography. By doing so, it uses those languages to “build” the documentation of something likely, although formally not documentable.
 In Potenza 100 a landscape is “created”, in order to highlight the totally real features of a fragile territory.

Roberto Boccaccino primarily focus on long-term photographic research and documentary projects. Over the years he received international awards including the Prize ATF Fnac and the first prize in the portrait category at Årets Pressefoto (Danish Press Photo). In 2015, in Palermo, he’s on of the founders of “Minimum”, a space dedicated to projects for photography and image. Potenza 100 is one of the photographic researches selected by Domusweb among the Gabriele Basilico Prize in Architecture and Landscape Photography 2018 candidates. The Prize intends to support the growth of visual languages in photography among a new generation of artists.