In a year characterised by the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the municipality of Capalbio, the festival has chosen to concentrate on the nature of the area, analysed from many viewpoints, including that of historic memory. Old and new photographs of its residents; the creation of Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in Giulio Pietromarchi’s photographs; the work on the landscape by Francesco Fossa, the research on the Colline Metallifere Park through photographs as well as historic and contemporary videos, and satellite images from Telespazio and e-Geos, the first signs of Capalbio’s willingness to examine itself in relation to the northern part of the territory of the province of Grosseto; and the first artists’ residencies.
The Englishman David Spero and the Spaniard Juan Fabuel were guests in Maremma. They were chosen for their previous works, which pondered the relationship between nature and photography: very beautiful and profound works that are not rhetorical in any way and are still being completed. These photographs are the perfect points of departure for the 2010 PhC Capalbiofotografia, entitled “Secondo Natura”, and were displayed with the last series of Marco Delogu’s “Black Suns”, taken on a trail in the oasis of Burano.
Spero’s “Settlements” is a constantly evolving photographic project that testifies to the life of a series of communities in Great Britain that strive for ecologically sustainable lifestyles by building house with a low environmental impact and living as much as possible in a regime of self-sufficiency in terms of food and energy. Following the road protests of the mid-Nineties, many militants from that movement founded communities and began to live in the woods, using recycled products and lumber from those woods to build houses, cultivating the land to grow their own food, and always using renewable energy. These photographs testify to the evolution of these communities through their homes, common spaces and infrastructures. Showing this work in Capalbio is a form of “protest” against some of the changes that, in recent years, have pushed our territory towards excessive and increasingly commonplace uncontrolled building, destroying the landscape and our profound identity. A first part of the “Settlements” project was displayed at the highly prestigious Photographer’s Gallery in London in 2006. David Spero received a fellowship from the British School at Rome in 2009.
For some time now, Juan Fabuel has photographed the beaches of the Mediterranean where African immigrants have landed. He photographs them at night, when they are deserted, as they appear to him and to thousands of immigrants. For his residency at Capalbio, we asked him to imagine the last days and nights of Caravaggio, who 400 years ago died in the pine grove of La Feniglia, which he probably reached on foot after being shipwrecked at Palo Laziale. Juan Fabuel is currently a fellow at the Real Academia de España in Rome.