Sicilian Walks Link to the Catalogue

The Museo Riso, Palermo, has a work by Richard Long entitled A Sicilian Walk, which recalls a hike he made in 1997 from Palermo to Agrigento. Long's text evokes a timeless landscape of plowing farmers and Greek temples. On my own hikes, I found it hard to ignore the ugly settlements, the garbage and the plastic bottles on the roadsides. At one point, I picked up a bottle that had been driven flat: In the backlight, it transformed into an organic-looking object – an artifact that could become the subject of future archaeology. Inspired by Long, I walked from Palermo to Agrigento and collected bottles in various stages of deformation. To produce my images I used the cyanotype, a process from the early days of photography first used by the botanist Anna Atkins to print her book British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1842/43).