Among
Fabio Barile
24x30 cm
48+20 pages
Soft cover
Edited by Stefania Rössl, Tommaso Parrillo
Design by Damiano Fraccaro/ Otium Studio
Text by Fabio Matano, Stefania Rössl, Samuele Vincenti
Published in July 2026
ISBN 979-12-80177-69-8
Witty #114
23€
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Among by Fabio Barile interprets the coastal stretch of Ostia Lido as an unstable territorial threshold, produced by the intersection of speculative coastal urbanisation processes, environmental transformations, and systems of territorial governance. The tourist coastline reflects the outcome of a specific land economy and of an eminently seasonal temporality, in which architectures are inscribed within recurring cycles of maintenance, obsolescence, and reactivation, making visible a condition of permanent structural precarity. Exposed to the erosive action of the sea and atmospheric agents, these structures emerge as residues of a spatial configuration of variable intensity, progressively destabilised by the morphological transformations of the coastline. Along the shoreline, seaside architectures cease to operate as functional devices and instead appear as surfaces subjected to a continuous regime of exposure that challenges the distinction between the built and the environment. The threshold between artificial and natural thus tends to dissolve, and the coastline emerges as a hybrid space traversed by simultaneous dynamics of decay, adaptation, and reconfiguration.
Buildings disintegrate under the action of the sea and return to the ground as dust, sand, reclaimed materials, artificial dunes.
Human constructions lose colour and geometry; everything yields, softens, and sediments.
In the final sequence, a corpus of images investigates the behaviour of water surfaces as a dynamic interface between land and sea. Shot from a fixed viewpoint with subtle variations in light, the images introduce a slowed temporality in which variation becomes an observational device for reading
coastal transformations.
This publication is part of the 'Whes the Sea Moves In' series and has been funded by European Union, NextGenerationEU, as part of the PNRR project “National Biodiversity Future Center” M4C2 I1.4 of the National Research Council
www.mic.democenterlecce.it
