The Island Within The Island

I was born and raised in Ragusa, in a place where - on the surface - nothing happens and everything seems fine. For years I lived as if deaf and mute to what surrounded me, until six years spent between Rome, Norway, Morocco, and the Netherlands gave me a distance I needed. When I came back, I no longer recognized the silence I grew up with - and I could no longer look away from it.

Beneath the greenhouses that stretch across the province of Ragusa lies one of Europe's most opaque agricultural systems. This project began as a personal need to understand a place I thought I already knew, and grew into a visual investigation of the invisible labor structures that sustain it. The first phase was research - walking the greenhouse landscape, learning its geography, its silences, its economy of survival.

The second phase was relationship. Through the Tunisian interpreter at Caritas Ragusa, I met a family of agricultural laborers living in Marina di Acate, in the area with the highest concentration of greenhouses in the region. What started as an assignment became something closer to a bond - one I am still building, carefully, without forcing it into the shape of a story that isn't mine to tell.

The Island Within The Island is not only about labor exploitation. It is about a landscape that hides in plain sight, and about my own return to it - with eyes no longer closed by familiarity.