Altre Tracce (Other Tracks)

Critique sheet

The exhibition Altre tracce (Other traces), by Cagliari photographer Cédric Dasesson, tells – through the ordered seriality of images of various formats – the story of Sardinia and its people, the slow process of adaptation of man and nature in a place and space where the slow passage of time is measured by a series of intervals that can be read as lines of rupture, elements of change and transformation.

Starting from the traces of remote anthropisations scattered across the island by the Sardinian people, connoted in the collective imagination as identity – dolmens, menhirs, tafoni and fraicate hollows, domus de janas, nuraghi, temples, dry-stone walls and pinnacles – the author recounts with images, a rhythmically varied and complex temporal process, clear and objective evidence of man’s continuous forms of adaptation to the inevitable transformations of the territory.

Dasesson concentrates his gaze on the passage from the nomadic condition of life to the settled, stable, permanent condition, the one that leaves recognisable traces of anthropisation, of “domestication”, on places. Within these processes of adaptation, an almost constant presence is the rock, a symbol of strength, resistance and hostility but also a refuge, a home, a community gathering space, as in places of worship.

Dasesson’s photographic research explores the links between the elements, often flattened by a stereotyped reading, that connote the fundamental characteristics of the people and gathers their fundamental notions, offering a direct association between place and its use. Places thus become great containers of information, traditions, mythological stories etched in stone and in part yet to be discovered. The process of adaptation reveals its reason for survival, a symbol of purposeful choices of life in total symbiosis with the territory, a symbol of stubbornness and perseverance in the will to live conditions often dictated by nature.

Biography

Cédric Dasesson (Cagliari, 1984) is a photographer who develops a predilection for studying the territory and the contemporary landscape. He uses photography as a means of research, identifying a path of analysis and reading of space, reading changes in the territory and sensitising the places he observes. His works have been shown in international exhibitions and are present in institutional collections – MUFOCO (Italian Museum of Contemporary Photography), MiBACT, University of Cagliari, Biennale di Pisa, Falía*, Biennale dello Stretto – and private collections such as the Vuitton Foundation. He has developed a descriptive method of the coastal landscape by levels: underwater, from land and from the sky, realising together with Sardarch and the Coastal Conservatory of the Region of Sardinia, a photographic project on the mapping of the territory. Among his interests is the analysis of the urban and rural territory. In 2019, he is one of the ten artists selected by MUFOCO and MiBACT for the development of the Atlante Architettura Contemporanea with which “10 viaggi nell’architettura contemporanea” is published and exhibited at the Milan Triennale and in Rome, at the Museo Nazionale Romano. He realises projects to identify the built environment through the Falia* artist residency. He collaborates with the Faculty of Architecture in Cagliari and with Sardarch. His main publications are Level (2017), Di notte il mare non dorme mai (2018), Costellazioni (2020) and Oltreterra (2023).

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