Filippo Brancoli Pantera

A series of photographs of the sea around Lampedusa (Italy), an island of just over 20 km² suspended between myth and border.

Politically rooted in Europe yet geologically anchored to the African plate, Lampedusa reveals itself as an extreme liminal space: ahead looms the primordial continent—the cradle of humankind, from which the great exodus of Homo sapiens began tens of thousands of years ago.

It is the same horizon from which today arrive contemporary migrations, a throbbing echo of that ancestral journey humanity has never ceased.

The sea captures its essence: a vibration that whispers continuity between the prehistoric past and our present.

They were or they weren't.
On an island or not.
An ocean or not an ocean
swallowed them up or it didn't.

Was there anyone to love anyone?
Did anybody have someone to fight?
Everything happened or it didn't
there or someplace else.

Seven cities stood there.
So we think.
They were meant to stand forever.
We suppose.

They weren't up to much, no.
They were up to something, yes.

Hypothetical. Dubious.
Uncommemorated.
Never extracted from air,
fire,water, or earth.

Not contained within a stone
or drop of rain.
Not suitable for straight-faced use
as a story's moral.

A meteor fell.
Not a meteor.
A volcano exploded.
Not a volcano.
Someone summoned something.
Nothing was called.

On this more-or-less Atlantis

-
Atlantis

Wisława Szymborska [1957]