Thinking Like an Island - Chiapparini + Marrese
  • Thinking Like an Island - Chiapparini + Marrese
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  • Overlapse - Thinking Like an Island - Chiapparini + Marrese
  • Overlapse - Thinking Like an Island - Chiapparini + Marrese
  • Overlapse - Thinking Like an Island - Chiapparini + Marrese
  • Overlapse - Thinking Like an Island - Chiapparini + Marrese
  • Overlapse - Thinking Like an Island - Chiapparini + Marrese
  • Overlapse - Thinking Like an Island - Chiapparini + Marrese
  • Overlapse - Thinking Like an Island - Chiapparini + Marrese
  • Overlapse - Thinking Like an Island - Chiapparini + Marrese
  • Overlapse - Thinking Like an Island - Chiapparini + Marrese
  • Overlapse - Thinking Like an Island - Chiapparini + Marrese
  • Overlapse - Thinking Like an Island - Chiapparini + Marrese

Thinking like an Island
Gabriele Chiapparini + Camilla Marrese

£48

The Island is distant in the Mediterranean sea, and 675 metres in height. It’s inhabited by an uncertain number of 30 to 60 people, year-round, with no hospital, no cars, no priests or police. Some islanders never consider leaving while others tried, only to return to their lives in the remote bubble. There are untold stories, complex family trees, and historical lore surrounding the community existing on loaves of hallucinogenic-laced bread.

Bound into an ‘unconventional’ book structure, Thinking like an Island reflects on a geographical, social and temporal space, on a system and its moveable logic. Avoiding the typical representation of an island as utopia or dystopia, this work looks at the continuous process of identity construction; clash and coexistence, choice and confinement, innovation and resistance. The experience proves to be stratified, plural and dense; a vertigo of increasing complexity.

FIRST EDITION Softcover, 17 x 22 cm portrait
224 pages across four integrated books (two sized 17×10.5 and two sized 8.4×22 cm)
Section-sewn, exposed bindings; foil on printed paper covers + spine
193 illustrations including photographs, archival images and drawings
Text by Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese
Published September 2024 | ISBN: 9781738130016

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Description

As our economic and social systems prove less sustainable, Chiapparini and Marrese ask if the island, where everything is reduced to minimum necessity, could be an idealistic model for surviving the crises that engulf us. Their work includes diary extracts, quotes from residents of the island, and exploratory photographs of mysterious landscapes and portraits. The book takes a poetic, philosophical approach to comprehending the wider world through the perspective of a solitary microcosm.

Book concept + design by Tiffany Jones

The Author

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 elaboration. In this process, they aim to use photography as a tool to visually articulate – rather than answer – complex questions. Their works have been exhibited at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven (NL), Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia (IT), Espaço Alto in San Paulo (BR), PhMuseum Lab in Bologna (IT), Spazio MAD in Magadino (CH), Focus Artphilein in Lugano (CH), Kranj Foto Fest (SI), Casa Testori in Milan (IT). Their work has been recipient of the PhMuseum Criticae prize (2022), and a finalist of the Luigi Ghirri Prize (2024).

instagram.com/gabrielechiapparini
instagram.com/camillamarrese

Reviews + Press

In Thinking like an Island, Chiapparini and Marrese present identity as something never fixed—it shifts and adapts, a vertiginous dance between the forces of isolation, connection, and the deep human need to belong. – Andrea Copetti, Tipi Bookshop

See more:
The Guardian
Tipi Bookshop review by Andrea Copetti
L’Œil de la Photographie (FR)
Noice magazine
lelitteraire (FR)

Special Notes

*Recommended pick by Photobookstore UK

9th November 2024 – Book Launch and signing at Polycopies in Paris, Concorde Atlantique

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