Calitri, Avellino, January 2007

Between 2007 and 2011, TerraProject photographers traveled across Italy. The work “4” was designed through the choice of four thematic areas that characterize the nature of the images. The images presented belong to four documentary photography projects that were born at different times and that are brought together on this occasion with the expedient of the 4 classic elements. The chapter Water documents the alarming anthropization of the 7,400 kilometers of the country’s coastline. Earth traces the scars left by the 5 major earthquakes of the last 40 years. The chapter Air tells the story of the most polluted industrial cities in Italy. And finally the chapter Fire focuses on the four active Italian volcanoes, a unique environment of fragile coexistence between man and nature.

 

The four chapters of the project are the result of a collective selection process, four groups of images within which the writer Wu Ming 2 has oriented himself in the construction of four stories. This new organism made of words and figures becomes a device that shifts the mere documentary nature, taking us to another territory, literary and not only geographical, made of a narration punctuated by precise visual references that become the protagonists of new stories. “4” is a self-produced book and an exhibition.

 

The book, divided into 4 volumes edited by Renata Ferri and with the artistic direction of Ramon Pez, was produced through a crowdfunding campaign on the Produzioni dal Basso platform.