My whole life, I have been soul searching for a place where to feel at the same time at home, and out in the world. A world that seems to be more and more difficult to navigate, to explore, to consider one’s own. Even here, in the Mediterranean basin, a place that for most of us epitomizes the feeling of home and has been doing so for millennia.

I found this place in a small envelope of photographs my mother had saved from way back when she and my father traveled across the Sahara Desert, all the way through it, from North to South. The photographs were taken by my father, an enthusiast photographer, who already knew that they were more than just souvenirs of an incredible trip. The images are wonderfully and soulfully repetitive: there is my mother, their car, and the vastity of the desert to witness the depths of their affection.

I see these photographs, the maps they used, the ephemera they gathered from the road and their memories, not only as a testimony of their love, but also as a romantic attempt to draw an imaginary map of the desert. A map made of dust and stars, burning sand and cold nights. A map of the infinite possibilities the world can offer.

I don’t regard this quest as sentimental, conversely, I think it is irrational, but still pertaining to science. The science of the human soul, of its search for love, happiness and a life lived sharing the time we are gifted. At its best our own spirit is a restless and wandering one. I felt we could, through these images, claim back a bit of that freedom for ourselves and imagine a world where roaming the planet is a defining trait of our identities.

An imaginary map of the desert as a metaphor for love, could only be drafted by playing with the objects I love. Among these are the experimental processes of multi-colored cyanotypes, and the slow, organic tones I gathered from the plants surrounding me. The repetition of the themes, the frames and the subjects, a narrative device normally used to summon the industrial quality of the photographic reproduction, is here intended, conversely, as a testament to the irreplaceability of the single, handmade, print. These are attempts, one after another, to follow on my father’s footsteps of curiosity, enthusiasm and love for life and the world.

This story is personal. Nothing more personal than a box of prints that have been among the building blocks of a family’s own identity. But since it’s been out in the world, since I started working on it, I felt connected to the universal theme of longing, for an individual, for a moment in life. Only looking back hard, through these images filled with sunlight and sand, I could find the strength and the audacity of feeling intrepid again.

Text by Gabriele Stabile.