At the edge of the city, where the urban grid starts to fade, I come across the banks of the Sangone stream and the Stura di Lanzo river in Turin, Italy. These banks, particularly during the winter months, are permeated with a wild green made up of leafless trees, fallen trunks, small ponds, and all sorts of detritus brought in by the watercourse.
Beneath a gray sky, the cold mist that is felt contributes to a silent and disquiet atmosphere that visually isolates me from the city. Through the moisty and opaque layer, one can hear the sound of traffic jam, distant voices, music and occasionally sirens rushing past. On the ground, urbanity also makes itself present in the form of high-voltage poles with their electric noise, in overpasses where I take shelter from the rain, and in the numerous lost and found objects, traces of human presence that intertwine with the local vegetation. Few people pass by and, here and there, one might mistake a stray dog with someone’s pet, or a campfire with a set of stones.
There is a striking analogy about these places that comes to one’s mind, one of an imaginary childhood battle ground where no one has yet taken its place, but also a resemblance with an idea of a city: one of a seemingly occasional encounter between disconnected elements in a dynamic of self-management.
Sponde is an encounter with the unstable nature of spaces that discloses the other side of urban greenery: hybrid, sometimes neglected, marginal or mostly unknown territories, where man-altered landscapes, wild autonomous vegetation and transitional uses of the land collide.
On the verge of becoming a third landscape, these spaces are neither neglected areas nor natural reserves, but interstitial urban parks without any symbolic status, where biological, cultural and social diversity finds its place beyond the planned and designed green structures of the inner city.
Luís Aniceto has been focusing his practice on landscape and territory, particularly in the city limits, where he often finds a tension between these two variable and sometimes contradictory premises. In his work, he often depicts places that seem not just unfinished but unfinishable, complex and unstable, and where vision and imagination can eventually liberate themselves. These places revolve around issues of deterritorialization, urban fragmentation and hybridness that are connected to the way cities in their formal understanding are being questioned.
After graduating from the School of Arts and Design of Caldas da Rainha he attended the Portuguese Institute of Photography in Lisbon. He worked as a photoreporter before he moved to Italy to join the collective of photographers Cesura, where he also worked with photographer Alex Majoli. Back in Portugal, he co-founded ZONA Magazine, a photographic publication of documentary nature born from the interest in thinking and observing the urban issues of his hometown territory, Almada. He taught at the Portuguese Institute of Photography where he also became responsible for the school’s cultural program.
He currently teaches photography at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Turin and works between Italy and Portugal.
© Text and pictures by Luís Aniceto
