Fra Terra e Cielo
A personal interpretation of the history of a place. The earth and the sky are the protagonists of a review of our rural past. A farmland that slowly turns back into earth, re-becoming air.
The farmstead that I discovered at Mortara, between the paddies of the Lomellina, was originally a medieval abbey, "Abbazia di Sant'Albino", the main stage for the bloody battle of 773 between Charlemagne and King Desiderio of the Lombard. This place was renamed Mortis Ara. Mortara, in Italian. The church of Sant'Albino, was part of the medieval site and is the only one left intact. Renewed and well looked after, it stands beside the ruins of the grand convent that housed important historic religious figures over the centuries which still sees pilgrims stop by on their way to the "Via Francigena".
In the 1800's, the convent was sold to a private buyer who utilised its agricultural and farming potential. That which was a grand farmland, encircled by cultivated terrains and rice fields, remained in use until the 1970's, after which it became abandoned and was never restored leaving it today an unused and abandoned site, dangerously made up of unstable bricks and unforgiving, invasive plantlife, a shell of what it once was.
Following the discovery of a rich historic background, of what was initially believed to be a grand area of abandoned agricultural property, I visited the site in different moments with the scope of concentrating on that which it transmitted to me, searching for the right moment in which to take my photographs.
Starting from the impression of 'disuse' I brought forward the idea that I had when I first inspected the area, viewing the farmland as a personification of a decomposed body, as a structure that is crumbling back into nature, almost sucking itself dry from the inside. The two elements that are the key factors of the abandonment of this farmstead are the earth, the inescapable element in which this farmland is bound to, and the sky, the element in which this disused area has succumb to at its own wish.
This report is opened with a picture of the two key elements, the earth and the sky, which unite with each other in a mirrored effect. The first photographs draw on the earth as if it were bedding, laid down over the farmland.
The other photographs depict the sky, encompassing the area like the borders of a frame in which the main focal point of the picture is the farmland itself ‘looking’ at the sky.
The choice of only taking vertical photographs reinforces the vertical rapport between the subjects: the earth, the farmland and the sky.
