Arcadia collects a series of landscaped gardens that represent multiple interpretations of the Greek myth and its variations. This project is a result of a number of journeys and residencies - across the UK, France and Italy - that focuses on landscapes visited during the Grand Tour and early voyage. Arcadia reassesses the Romantic view of the eighteenth century travellers in an attempt to understand how their perception and representation of the foreign landscape has shaped the way in which tourists relate to and percieve new territories.

The project incorporates new images produced in my large format camera and archive images of paintings, illustrations and Classical literature references as a means to establish tangential conceptual correlations between different modes of artistic representation, and of scenes that take place in various temporal and geographical spaces. This ongoing investigation uses a non-linear narrative that connects past and present as a means to imagine how a future landscape may look like.

Arcadia takes the shape of a long poem in the making that is composed of a number of cantos exploring different symbols, archetypes and myths - the island, the hero’s journey, the fall, the cave, the sacred tree.

With the collaboration of the Italian institutions FAI (Fondo dell’Ambiente Italiano), Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per l'Area Metropolitana di Roma e per la Provincia di Rieti (Lazio). Supported by the Institut d’Estudis Baleàrics, Institut Ramon Llull (Spain), and the residency program l’Aquila Reale Arte e Natura (Italy).

Note that the photographs I have taken are monochrome and have been produced within the past ten years, while most archive images used in the project appear in colour. When possible, I have identified the titles and authors of the images in the captions. The archive images have been collected from library books and from the internet and are used for research purposes under a CC license.