Nesechos

2025 - ongoing

Remote islands are unique mysteries to solve. Since ancient times, writers or explorers have seen them as places of enchantment, realms to unveil and delve into, distant abodes far from any reach of men. Fragile worlds suspended between isolation and resilience, remote islands survive with few and infrequent links to the mainland, time and again neglected by central governments, and with populations dwindling year after year.

Regardless, they endure: be they small rocky hamlets in the sea or extended but sparsely populated strips of lands, these islands manage to beat at their own hearts, striving to persist against abandonment, seclusion, climate change, scarce resources, and social hardships.

Nesechos is a long-term photographic and narrative project, a query into life on remote islands and their small communities. Portraits, daily life documentation, and written records focus on the people who make these places their home: the ones who were born there and never left, or still come back whenever they can, or those who discovered the island and can’t help but return.

Is life on these strips of land amidst the sea one of choice or submission? Are remote islands refuges, even healing cocoons, or prisons? How do people cope with living in places where the sea decides when one gets to leave or stay?

The first chapter of this project is set in Linosa, a 5.4 square km volcanic island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Here, about 400 inhabitants live year-round, linked to Lampedusa and mainland Sicily only by a few ferries every day, unless the sea decides otherwise.
Here, most of the population is made up of middle-aged to old people. Young people move to Sicily during the year to attend high school, while since the number of kids is very low from primary to middle school, they organize multi-grade classes.