Explorations among the rural villages of Capitanata
Photo essay by Aldo Amoretti
The work “Viaggio nel Tavoliere delle Puglie” tells the story of an experience of exploration of the Foggia countryside, carried out in November 2022, by Aldo Amoretti and Giuseppe Tupputi in search of the villages of the agrarian reclamation and the ghettos occupied by migrants.
On one side, traveling along the solitary roads that surround Foggia, you come across the centers of Segezia, Giardinetto, Incoronata, Mezzanone, Cervaro which, now inhabited by only a few souls, continue to dot the plain speaking to each other from a distance with the civic towers and bell towers.
On the other side, sinking into this oceanic plain, you can also glimpse the ghettos of Mezzanone, Rignano Garganico, Tre Titoli, Borgo Cicerone which, dispersed in the countryside to the point of becoming invisible, are overflowing with an exiled and nameless humanity.
All around, boundless, the Tavoliere countryside extends: an immense plain that lets everything be seen up to the horizon and that equally hides everything in its infinite distances.
There are many unresolved contradictions condensed in these places. There are many anxieties that inhabitthis landscape in which the monumental and the vernacular, the formless and the sublime coexist like different souls in a single body. At the same time, however, they are hidden behind the opaque veil of provincial anonymity, behind the silent ordinariness that distinguishes these humble countrysides placed outside the spotlight of contemporary.
The intention is therefore to try to free the image of these places from their superficial obviousness devoid of content, seeking new keys to reading to observe them, describe them, and reinterpret them, to offer them the light of a new narrative.
In this sense, composed of photographic and textual apparatuses, this work tries to start a physiognomic and at the same time existential reading of the characteristics of the agricultural landscape of Foggia, investigating the reasons for the isolation and abandonment, the disorientation and estrangement in which the depopulated villages of Capitanata seem immersed. Taken under opaque skies, at the arrival of the faint glow of dawn or of a livid twilight almost completely covered by clouds, the photographs on display tell us about the places by choosing distance and solitude as conceptual keys to interpret their presence in the contemporary. On the other hand, both the architecture of the centers of agrarian reform, both the illegal shacks and the containers of the ghettos, both the old farmers on the doorsteps of the farmhouses, both the young migrants who cross the countryside following inexhaustible routes: all the bodies that animate this landscape appear “always alone and never alone, […] they seem to carry a world with them and have lost it”, like presences perpetually accompanied by the spectre of an absence. And it is this concept that Aldo Amoretti’s photographs try to convey.
A question remains unanswered at the end of this journey: what will become of this plain called Tavoliere because it is flat and deep like the sea? What is the fate of the ghettos, the villages and their inhabitants? Is it still possible to inhabit the immense distances of the countryside through the reconstruction of archipelagos of urban, landscape and human relations? Or are these countrysides destined to become an increasingly abysmal ocean of large estates in which to hide more or less recent ruins and more or less dramatic wrecks?
Giuseppe Tupputi
