FOGGIASCAPE is many things: first and foremost, a research project conducted by Kash Gabriele Torsello over a full decade—from 2012 to 2022—across the Capitanata region.
It subsequently evolved into a photographic exhibition promoted by the Institute of Mediterranean Cultures of the Province of Lecce, curated with scholarly rigor by Renata Ferri, and supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the “Strategia Fotografia 2025” grant scheme.
The exhibition toured three iconic sites within the region’s network of Museums: Acaya Castle (in the province of Lecce), the “Francesco Ribezzo” Archaeological Museum in Brindisi, and the Palazzo Dogana Gallery in Foggia. This journey intentionally sought to unite diverse contexts and territories into a narrative that also served as a way of drawing closer to the locations featured in Torsello’s work.
The exhibited works transport the visitor into a world suspended in a dimension that is simultaneously archaic and dreamlike; nature and urban landscapes alike are transfigured by Torsello’s sub specie aeternitatis gaze.
The entire “FoggiaScape” project is also a visual narrative—and thus all the more direct and powerful—of a complex and contradictory territory. It is a story told from the margins, offering those willing to accept the invitation a journey of discovery, understanding, and debate.
Torsello documents and simultaneously questions—shunning both easy consolation and the rhetoric of urban decay—the city outskirts, rural villages, and the sites of exploitative labor, caporalato and grueling work, thereby bestowing upon them a dignity too often denied in everyday life.
But “FoggiaScape” is something more, for in Torsello’s photographs—so clearly defined and geographically recognizable—the margins of the entire world resonate, and the humanity of each of us—or at least what remains of it—is called into question.
Gabriella Berardi
Galleria Palazzo Dogana
Foggia // Apulia // Italy
