Photo essay. Ilaria Abbiento’s cartographies of the sea

With photographs and nautical chart, this research tells the interior landscapes of the author, the sea of Naples and its nuances.

Ilaria Abbiento, Cartografia del Mare, Napoli, 2018

My photographic research investigates the boundaries of my origins, my places of belonging, my inner landscapes, those of my memory.
The passion for the geographical maps, the atlases, the globes that I keep from my childhood is revealed in this work in the choice to use a cartographic itinerary to navigate along the coast line that circumscribes the city where I was born and where I practice my art, Naples.

Along the shore drawn on the nautical map every day I explored a different stretch of coast and as in a logbook I noted my findings, the traces of my passage, my reflections, building an imaginary archive of the sea and its changing variations in relation to space, to the climate and to my moods. The cartography of the sea is my music pentagram, an aquatic diagram in which alternate the blue tempera, from cobalt blue to aquamarine green to white foam, with the geographical lines of my inner ocean. It is a fluid map, a geography of thought in which the swaying of the sea recalls the temperament of my hidden archipelago.

Ilaria Abbiento is a Naples-based visual artist who works with photography, installation and video to build poetic narratives that investigate her inner landscape and her memories. For some time, she has undertaken research on the theme of the sea and the Mediterranean to which she dedicates several works including the Cartografia del mare exhibited at the MedPhotoFest Mediterranean Festival in Catania and at the Al Blu di Prussia gallery in Naples, 12 volte Mare publishing by the artisan house Ilfilodipartenope and in 2018 the work Atlante that enters the art collection of the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome.

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