Altera Italia is a photographic project that investigates the ritual culture of Southern Italy: it is a physical journey, but also a voyage through time, to discover the roots and meanings of the festivities that shaped the identity of the Meridione (the Italian South).

This project led the author to travel across Southern Italy and its islands for five years, while also exploring archival texts and images to better understand her place of origin – a place she had previously learned to view through an external gaze. For a year, she analyzed photographs, documentaries, and books from the 1950s that portrayed the South as an exotic, archaic, and primitive land, often drawing from field studies on ritual traditions conducted by anthropologists.

Altera Italia brings together the fruits of her research and is structured into two main bodies of work. The first consists of archives that the artist has physically and analogically manipulated to reclaim the magical horizon that was lost under a positivist approach; the second stems from extensive documentary fieldwork on rituals, carried out in Puglia, Basilicata, Campania, Calabria, Sicily, and Sardinia.

Altera Italia is more than just a photographic project: it is a manuscript, a journey woven from photographs of rituals, manipulated archival imagery, symbols, and texts. The universe it conjures is intentionally evocative rather than descriptive. It is an invitation to cast aside judgment and embrace a new, multi-layered complexity in the imagery we associate with the Italian South.