“The Inventory of Via Emilia” is a project by Italian photographer Barbara Rossi. In her words, “via Emilia is the great roman artery built in 187 a.C. to connect Rimini and Milan that crosses Emilia Romagna, a region in North Italy. The inventory is an attempt to catalog signs and changes left by man in that section of Italian landscape. Most of the time these changes don’t improve our lifestyle, but are just traces, contradictory traces of our intervention in the landscape. In the complexity of these particular Italian territories we can recognize and classify specimens, dividing reality into taxonomies. This process allows us to mitigate the conflict between rules and chaos and to understand the transformation of the landscape. Traveling along Via Emilia, I left out city centers in favor of suburban areas, the ones apparently devoid of a common logic where people seem to claim a right to creative expression that modifies the landscape. SS9 describes a fragmented landscape, the result of a trip back-and-forth (between Rimini and Milano) undertaken not only with the aim to describe the landscape’s “life cycle”, but also to trigger questions, reflections and future projects.”
Images and text by Barbara Rossi
