ICI London proudly supported the publication of the photobook Thinking Like an Island by the Italian artistic duo Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese, published by Overlapse in October 2024.
The Island is distant in the Mediterranean Sea, and 675 meters 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 the typical representation of an island as a utopia or dystopia, this work looks at 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.
More info about the photobook HERE.
Gabriele Chiapparini (b. 1980, Italy) and Camilla Marrese (b. 1998, Italy) are an artistic duo working mainly through photography. Bringing together their backgrounds as film director (Gabriele) and graphic designer (Camilla), they strongly 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. Their works have been exhibited at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven (NL), Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia (IT), Espaço Alto in San Paulo (BR), PhMuseum Lab in Bologna (IT), Spazio MAD in Magadino (CH), Focus Artphilein in Lugano (CH), Kranj Foto Fest (SI), Casa Testori in Milan (IT). Their work has been the recipient of the PhMuseum Criticae Prize (2022), and a finalist of the Luigi Ghirri Prize (2024).
