Giada Ripa

In the attic of a family home in Italy, Giada Ripa discovered an album of photographs of the city of Yokohama taken by Italian photographer Felice Beato, the first visual narrator of 1860s Japanese society. Ripa later discovered, while researching Beato and his images, a body of work created by her own relative, Mathilde Ruinart, a 19th-century artist, who traveled to Japan in 1867 with her diplomat husband providing a vivid visual description of it. In The Yokohama Project, Ripa has followed Beato and Ruinhart’s respective footsteps, and through a Western prism that bridges their 19th-century gaze and her own, attempts to identify local contemporary analogies and convey the transformations of society and landscape in Yokohama and its surroundings.

Giada Ripa’s photos form an itinerary of landscapes traversing Italy, North to South, focusing on five regions: Friuli, Lombardy, Tuscany, Abruzzo, and Sicily. This account is not limited to a photographic album; rather, it calls upon champions from each area who, through engaging interviews, describe the positive impact on its territory of the commitment of an important local business. Concrete examples of this cooperation are the environmental revival carried out in the Prealpi Giulie Nature Reserve in Friuli, the conservation of local species of flowers carried out with the cooperation of the Botanical Gardens in Palermo, and stretches of land made available and leased free of charge. Thus, The Thin Line represents a hope, but also an awareness of the territory and of those who not only inhabit it now, but will come to inhabit it in the future. Text in English and Italian