Cagliari

Cagliari, in a island of pastoralists and farmers, is also a place of water and sea, made special by encounters with the aquatic.

Michele’s beautifully visual comic reminds us of this urban seascape, shaped by the water as much as by the life on the firm ground. Scales of experience, and places made by boats coming and going, connected to elsewhere.

Lorenzo’s evening walk by the sea draws on this connection to place and living things, with details and plants making up place, as well as his own movement through it, beyond the postcard landscape.

Miriam travels to the beach, the place becoming exceptional through the memory of a magical encounter with its non-human inhabitants. Places are also experienced as landscapes, experienced bodily but also as something that is observed through a frame. Comics allow us to recapture this viewing and framing, representing it on the page.

Francesca’s experience of beach life is similar: a voyage somewhere to feel and live in the moment. The Poetto beach: poetry inscribed in the landscape, named as such.

Likewise, Michaela’s experience of the beach is connected to legend, the past and mythological struggles between good and evil, as much as by sand between the toes.

Beaches not only as places to sit on to contemplate the world, but also places that require care and work. Martina narrates how practices of care can also made places, as the collective practice of cleaning up the beach constructs belonging in place.

Lives and places, between the land and the sea. Places of contact.