When with the landscape architect Sauro Turroni we thought about the idea of photographing the hydrogeological instability that hit the hills of Romagna, as a consequence of the tragic flood of May 2023, we didn’t imagine what we would find. We were unprepared on how to approach the topic, on how to identify landslides, on how to move. For about six months, when the weather permitted, we went out every week, traveling in his van, through the hills between the provinces of Rimini and Bologna. We had positions on the maps, but it was almost always very complicated to reach them, we happened to travel many kilometers, arrive at inaccessible points and not understand how to get to the landslide. Later we developed a more effective method, consulting the geologists of the region who sometimes accompanied us, taking us to the most spectacular places. The first question I think about is: can we talk about beauty, spectacular, in the face of an event that caused victims, caused immense damage to agriculture and homes and completely changed the appearance of the landscape? Mauro, the geologist who is with us, talks about 81,000 landslides.
Disfigured Romagna: the photographic project
81,000, in a very short time, some in a few minutes. Landslide, a generic name to identify slips, erosions, flows, collapses, flows; in recent months I have learned the differences between the various types of earth movements.
Just before Christmas, at an exit near Predappio, we saw an elderly gentleman and his grandson build a small Christmas tree made of colored balloons, at the foot of a massive earth collapse. It was rather curious to see this very colorful object and relate it to the alienating environment in which it found itself: a chasm of earth descending from the hill. A little further up, another landslide has bent an enormous electricity pylon in two, now it looks like a wounded animal. It’s so big that I can’t fit it into a single image, so I have to take multiple photos and then recompose the final figure in Photoshop.
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The map of the flooded countries
A few weeks later, a Modigliana, we met Libero, an elderly gentleman who was looking down from the road at his farm which contained 600 beautiful olive trees, swept away by a landslide. Three remain to form a fragile and harmonious figure.
TO Fontanelice a man has died, he didn’t have time to escape from his house, and on the rubble there is now a thin tree.
In Castel del Rio they tell of a man who felt the house shaking in the middle of the night, so he ran away in his pajamas, but the earth opened up under his feet and he felt like he was being chased by the clods. He arrived in town. His house is literally zero, flat, one with the land that housed it.
TO Dovadolaas soon as the rains stopped, an entire hill broke away and in a few minutes a lake thirty meters deep was formed.
TO Brisighella a lady found a grand canyon behind her house: where there were fruit trees there are now earthen spiers. Once again it is a painful and spectacular landscape.
I travel through the landslides from inside, far and wide, and look for the right points of view to represent the majesty of the ruptures in the landscape. The second issue I think about concerns the difficulty of representing these places: as much as I try to find the right vision, I realize that photography has limits and it is not a question of using a wider lens.
Romagna disfigured: the landslides
The landslides have no visual references, when I enter a landslide what I see is out of the ordinary, it is an all-encompassing experience, and the camera fails in its representative intent. No matter how much information I try to include in an image, the result never lives up to expectations because, as the photographer Guido Guidi points out to me, landslides have no geometry. You can photograph them as a background, and then they are a scenography in which to make something happen, but if they are the subject of the photograph then they escape representation. If I cannot represent them exhaustively, I concentrate on the particular, I dedicate myself to the narration of the parts, to sufficiently expressive details.
Only a flight with the drone, which puts the landslide in relation to the surrounding landscape, makes us understand the breadth of the places, the depth of the chasms, brings the eye back to understanding, providing it with a map.
The project is supported by Strategia Fotografia 2023, promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture
Silvia Camporesi
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