Feature: The mooring Island: what does ‘home’ mean?
© Bartolomeo Rossi, from the series The mooring Island
Home is generally regarded as the place where a person lives. But, home can also be a feeling that someone experiences often far from their living space, far away from their native land. Today more than ever, home can be anywhere and nowhere. And sometimes, it is up to us to find it.
Driven by charm, the Italian photographer, Bartolomeo Rossi, has come all the way to Iceland, where he has surprisingly found a mooring, a feeling of home. Perhaps, it is due to that sublime solitude that he is used to experiencing in his hometown’s wood that Iceland has appeared so familiar to him.
© Bartolomeo Rossi, from the series The mooring Island
The photographer from Udine visited Iceland several times from 2015 to 2020. Every time he returned to Italy, he kept his relationship with the land alive through the revision of photographic material, the writing of his impressions, and the deepening of Icelandic literature. Iceland had soon become an internal place.
“That’s why I think I have never left. This in-depth analysis has allowed me to be more and more aware of what I was looking for. Research has become more and more precise and conscious”, explains Bartolomeo.
If we ask him why he felt at home in Iceland, the photographer may not know how to give us an answer. Indeed, the bond that holds us so close to a land that is not ours is inexplicable.
This question will never find an answer, which is why the project will always remain somewhat incomplete. In response to “What does home mean?”, Bartolomeo’s project The mooring Island presents memory traces captured through the camera.
© Bartolomeo Rossi, from the series The mooring Island
It would be reductive to consider The mooring Island as a reportage or a travel photography project. Rather, we can define it as a story through images where Iceland turns into the scenery of a search for memories, an internal place, which the photographer tries to make universal.
To view more of Bartolomeo Rossi’s work, visit his website.
