The Eventual Islands
Visual field book — Guglielmo Giomi
The Island is the place where many people —including the author— spent their holidays. In the past 60 years, the Island's economic system has shifted completely from agriculture to summer tourism. Each winter its population gets drastically reduced, shops close, workers get unemployed due to the absence of winter jobs, and, according to many residents and tourists, the Island goes into hibernation for about six months.
Throughout his life, Guglielmo Giomi has done nothing but perpetrate this vision.
But in the winter between 2019 and 2020 he returned to Elba Island during a terrible pandemic and decided to live there during the cold months, trying to negotiate his vision built over the years and exploring the neglected and exploited spaces in it. Deserted by most of its supposed inhabitants after a recurring catastrophe, the Island’s environment appeared to be in a state of forgetfulness. Through photography Giomi tries to “abandon” the supposedly known touristic Island in order to “inhabit” a new one made by elusive encounters hinting towards a whispered Utopia. By addressing the contrasting relationship between touristic exploitation and perception of the environment, Giomi confronts the deepest frictions between space and place.
On a deserted beach some children start building houses, on the mountain a family fixes a drystone wall after a fire, two masked figures climb a locked gate to get some oranges from a closed hotel’s garden.
What is left abandoned in the space of exploitation became inhabited by a quiet community whose traces are barely visible. Looking at the Island from a distance will likely give the appearance of absence, but what you will find with an embodied point of view is a different future for a piece of land in the sea: the Eventual Island.
