Pad (Dec 2021)
Photography Testimony of Artisanal Values. The Boat Project as a Historical Memory of the Mediterranean
Abstract
In a social and economic context that moves according to rapid patterns, in a contraction of time that paradoxically distances the past and brings with it an increasingly innovative future, photography can become a historical memory of ancient designs close to social and cultural values and traditions. The waves of the Mediterranean are ploughed by ships and small boats, projects that find their roots in the most ancient of human history and are still present today and continue to unite lands and men. It is the boat that merges the sea between lands. The gozzo, a small wooden boat, is an ancient project that was able to exploit knowledge from the past. The contribution intends to investigate how photography has been and still is today an important tool for telling the story of the past and useful for handing down forgotten forms and views. The heirs of that specific knowledge, of that past which formed an entire society, are destined to disappear: the photography of construction sites, tools and craftsmen represents one of the privileged ways of keeping memory of this history. Design, understood as a wide-ranging design process, can become the historical memory of society, and photography, which has always been a tool for sharing and a means of communication, can transform itself into an opportunity for historical and social investigation, always carrying with it the Barthesian axiom of what has been.
