The Noise of an Invisible Land

EDITION

2020

school

Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche (ISIA)
Urbino, Italy

The noise of an invisible land is an investigation into the borders of a real and insurmountable space occupied by the military bases of Sardinia: “real places out of all places”, denied and invisible. Since the 1950s, important pre-war exercises have been based in these territories by Italian and foreign armed forces. Over the years, this activity has had a strong impact on the entire ecosystem, causing irreversible damage to the environmental balance. The project aims to visually investigate these places, attempting to overcome the limits of invisibility and unrepresentability of military areas. The narrative insists on the presence of constant censorship that excludes us from the heterotopic space and of a recurrent impossibility of arriving at a full revelation of what is canonically visible. The narrative structure brings together geographical images of invisible landscapes, infrared images, natural elements taken from military areas, and historical archive images. This visual system tries to answer through a succession of symbols, traces, limits and clues, a main question: how can we speak through the image of a place whose visibility is violently protected? In this project, the only possible vision suggests that there’s something beyond, it keeps showing the existence of a deep and hidden reality where it’s not for us to know and therefore it’s also the appearance of everything that is not seen.