Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese: Thinking Like An Island

Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese: Thinking Like An Island by Michael HoneggerNovember 2, 2024

©Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese: Thinking Like An Island, Front Cover, published by Overlapse

One must be ambidextrous in opening this beautifully and cleverly crafted monograph about a mysterious island by the creative duo, Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese. Their creation, “Thinking Like an Island” , published by Overlapse, provokes the viewer to engage in a visual and mental jigsaw puzzle with psychological overtones. The book is a feast served á la carte or in its entirety depending upon the path you choose. Its layout consists of four rectangular mini booklets that can (and probably should) be viewed as a group in sequence revealing the mysteries of a lightly inhabited island somewhere off the coast of Italy (or is it?). You can never be certain of where you are, nor can you be sure of when, but the one certainty is that the island is remote but not remote enough to avoid an Amazon delivery.

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©Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese: Thinking Like An Island, published by Overlapse

Chiapparini and Marrese toy with the traditional and the modern as they portray their landscapes, seascapes and portraits of an anonymous land that happens to be surrounded by water. They convey a profound psychological isolation on the part of residents of the island that is contagious as you turn the pages. There is history in artifacts that reference the sea, ancient civilizations, agricultural tools and simple pastimes but their disassociation from the personal is unsettling. So too are the portraits of the island’s residents who remain nameless, identified only by an italicized capital letter in the text that accompanies some of the images.

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©Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese: Thinking Like An Island, published by Overlapse

The book and the images raise numerous questions for the observer. Is this an island utopia or simply a means to escape from the wider world and its current problems? We learn that some former residents have emigrated to Australia while newcomers from Austria and Germany seek ecological means of living and Moroccans come to fill jobs that others refuse. The houses on the island seem like islands unto themselves…”islands within islands”. And a young boy creates a circular path for his bicycle on the only flat area on the island between the pier and the heliport…raising the question, why a heliport? Probably because the island has no hospital. Locals have been eating bread made with a rye mutation containing the same basis as LSD since the early 20th century so one can delve deeply into these circular rabbit holes in pondering the island’s mysteries.

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©Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese: Thinking Like An Island, published by Overlapse

As told by Chiapparini and Marrese, “The island is coming closer to us, and at the same time moving further away. Stories contradict other stories. Whatever reality might have taken shape, it eventually reveals to be, just as rocks under water, irreducibly different to what we thought it was.” Such is the manner in which one thinks like an island…a journey well worth exploring in its richness and creativity.

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©Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese: Thinking Like An Island, published by Overlapse

Gabriele Chiapparini (b. 1980, Italy) and Camilla Marrese (b. 1998, Italy) are an artistic duo working mainly through photography. Bringing together their backgrounds as film director (Gabriele) and graphic designer (Camilla) they strongly believe in collaboration as a path to transform and process individual thinking into matter for collective collaboration. In this process, they aim to use photography as a tool to visually articulate-rather than answer- complex questions. This body of work was the foundation for Camilla Marrese’s BA project in Graphic Design and Visual Communication at ISIA Urbino supervised by Luca Capuano.