Overlapse presents 'Thinking like an Island' by Gabriele Chiapparini & Camilla Marrese
Join us at Photobook Cafe in the lower gallery on Saturday, 12th April to meet the artists, a duo based in Bologna, Italy. They will share background details behind making the work, in conversation with Overlapse publisher and book designer Tiffany Jones.
Talk at 5.30pm - Event till 8pm - All welcome
The work: The Island is distant in the Mediterranean sea, and 675 metres in height. It’s inhabited by an uncertain number of 30 to 60 people, year-round, with no hospital, no cars, no priests or police. Some islanders never consider leaving while others tried, only to return to their lives in the remote bubble. There are untold stories, complex family trees, and historical lore surrounding the community existing on loaves of hallucinogenic-laced bread.
Bound into an ‘unconventional’ book structure, Thinking like an Island reflects on a geographical, social and temporal space, on a system and its moveable logic. Avoiding typical representation of an island as utopia or dystopia, this work considers the continuous process of identity construction; clash and coexistence, choice and confinement, innovation and resistance. The experience proves to be stratified, plural and dense; a vertigo of increasing complexity.
As our economic and social systems prove less sustainable, Chiapparini and Marrese ask if the island, where everything is reduced to minimum necessity, could be an idealistic model for surviving the crises that engulf us. Their book features diary extracts, quotes from residents of the island, and photographs of mysterious landscapes and portraits. It takes a poetic, philosophical approach to comprehending the wider world through the perspective of a solitary microcosm.
The Artists: Based in Bologna, Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese are an artistic duo working mainly through photography. Bringing together their backgrounds as film director (Gabriele) and graphic designer (Camilla), they believe in collaboration as a path to transform and process individual thinking into matter for collective elaboration. In this process, they aim to use photography as a tool to visually articulate – rather than answer – complex questions.
Book published by Overlapse - overlapse.com
Softcover, 17 x 22 cm portrait 224 pages across four integrated books
Exposed sewn bindings 193 photographs, archival images and drawings
Text by Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese
https://www.overlapse.com/thinking-like-an-island/
Social media handles
Instagram @overlapse @camillamarrese @gabrielechiapparini