Carlo Bonazza DRIFTWOOD

There is only childhood.
The rest is usurpation that slowly devours us.
We are villages besieged by sands, eroded by relentless, invisible, inaudible, merciless tides in their monotony.
If something is saved, it is because it continues to happen, still, invincible, indifferent to everything:
it is the wonder of childhood.

Piergiorgio Zotti from Shanghai 1999, Photoedizioni, 2006

The place is the beach stretching from Principina a Mare towards the mouth of the Ombrone River, on the border with the Maremma Natural Park.
The beach is scattered as far as the eye can see with woods and logs of all kinds brought by the river and bleached by the sea, accumulating everywhere on the shore. In this long elephant graveyard, rudimentary huts have sprung from those very woods. They are fragile and primitive, made only of logs piled together to form precarious shelters. They were built by beachgoers: fishermen who stay overnight, bathers, campers, or perhaps unknown passersby. They have become numerous, sprouting close to each other to form spontaneous clusters, almost a prehistoric village that strongly marks the coastline and transforms the landscape just a few kilometers from the last tourist structures.
Many have erected them: barefoot, in underwear, with bare hands, they built without tools, using only the sea woods skillfully and creatively interlocked. They made the door, the roof, and sometimes even put a flag on top. They couldn’t resist the desire to mark a
space and make it recognizable, to claim it to be welcomed and protected: from the sun, the night, the wind, to sleep, to make love. After all, this is the primary sense of the desire for home, to inhabit a place: to adapt it to oneself and recognize it as one’s own.
I let myself be carried away by the wildest utopia: it was a primitive village on the ocean, built by castaways after the catastrophe, the zero degree of architecture, the archetype of building. The same as all the tent camps of the Native Americans, the fishing villages of Tierra del Fuego made with whale bones, the charcoal burners’ huts in the scrub.
And around those exhausted woods are everywhere with their twisted masses, displaying their involuntary but powerful aesthetics. They then become fossils of other lives, you see the skin of the wood worn by time, the skeleton of the whale, we recognize faces with grotesque expressions, fantastic monsters, sea animals
Especially if we look at them from below, as we do lying on the sand, or as children do.

Carlo Bonazza

Carlo Bonazza, photographer, publisher, photography teacher, has been working in Grosseto since 1979 and uses photography as a tool for observing contemporary life.
Always interested in the relationship with space and its symbols, he has worked on photographic investigation projects and published image books on places, landscapes, and their transformations. He catalogs, studies, and restores historical photographic collections concerning the Maremma Toscana and curates a series of monographs on the subject. He has conducted extensive teaching activities on photography: from middle school to the University Center, from prison workshops to courses for asylum-seeking immigrants. He has long collaborated with the Archive of Popular Traditions of the Maremma and is a founding member of the Association of Photography and Territory.