Thinking like an Island

First edition of Thinking like an Island by Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese (2024)

First impression 

Small format paperback in new condition 

224 pages across four integrated softcover books

Section-sewn, exposed bindings; foil on printed paper covers + spine

193 illustrations including photographs, archival images and drawings

Text by Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese

About

The Island is distant in the Mediterranean sea, and 675 metres in height. It’s inhabited by an uncertain number of 30 to 60 people, year-round, with no hospital, no cars, no priests or police. Some islanders never consider leaving while others tried, only to return to their lives in the remote bubble. There are untold stories, complex family trees, and historical lore surrounding the community existing on loaves of hallucinogenic-laced bread.

Bound into an ‘unconventional’ book structure, Thinking like an Island reflects on a geographical, social and temporal space, on a system and its moveable logic. Avoiding the typical representation of an island as utopia or dystopia, this work looks at the continuous process of identity construction; clash and coexistence, choice and confinement, innovation and resistance. The experience proves to be stratified, plural and dense; a vertigo of increasing complex,

As our economic and social systems prove less sustainable, Chiapparini and Marrese ask if the island, where everything is reduced to minimum necessity, could be an idealistic model for surviving the crises that engulf us. Their work includes diary extracts, quotes from residents of the island, and exploratory photographs of mysterious landscapes and portraits. The book takes a poetic, philosophical approach to comprehending the wider world through the perspective of a solitary microcosm.