Growth
The Third Landscape designates the sum ofspaces where man abandons the evolution
of the landscape to nature only.
– Gilles Clément
Growth (2009) concerns the relationship between Nature and abandoned industrial areas.
This work comes up from the observation of several urban spaces in Genova, Italy: Its history has been characterized by heavy industrialization in the Fifties followed, forty years later, by a sudden reorganization of the economic activities which left many areas neglected and spoiled. Nevertheless the exploitation of the natural territory and its neglect created liminal spaces within which Nature can regenerate: The growth of plants and weeds build another form of landscape, called by Gilles Clément ‘Third Landscape’. The border which separates the natural and the artificial becomes permeable and undecided.
In these locations Nature, personified as a female entity, acts like a verb on the concrete because she claims her space back from the man-altered landscape: By doing this she subverts the destructive role of men onto the natural environment and creates a new grammar of space.
The method applied to accomplish this work starts from the consideration that photography interprets and constructs meanings within the contemporary human and natural environment. The indexicality of photography embodies not only in the greenery depicted, but also in the use of portrait format, which is index of growth, interpreted as vertical development.
Photography narrates places and saves them from indifference. This led me to a non staged approach, in order to be as direct as possible about the landscape: It is not a deadpan attitude, yet an interest in reality as I found it. I also decided to wander over these locations before shooting, in order to be physically involved in the landscape, rather than acting as a bystander.
