The beach is an independent micro-world with multiple meanings. It is first and foremost a geographical context, a territory with a fragile balance, exposed to the flow of people and the massive transformations caused by seaside tourism. A natural and at the same time artificial place. Consequently, it is also a public and social space: a place of identity, capable of offering a glimpse into a precise historical moment, a social context and its customs and habits.
The beach is also, increasingly, a cultural and narrative theme. A setting for narratives and portraits, it has often been depicted in art, photography and films. It is from a focus on visual arts and media that the idea of creating Archivio Balneare comes up: a photographic and audiovisual archive on Instagram, which aims to collect images where the beach is central, both as protagonist and as setting. The page intends to show how the beach has been represented by artists, cinematographers and photographers, how it has served as backdrop to the succession of events and personalities, and what it can in turn communicate about a given historical, social and cultural moment.
In this sense, the project is strictly linked to the sense of memory, and it is no coincidence that it was immediately conceived from an archival perspective: the idea is to preserve and share this visual knowledge also to spur a certain kind of historical testimony, linked more to a social and cultural inquiry – far from the spotlight – rather than to official chronicles.
Moreover, with this collection we also want to reflect on the meaning and consequences of the representation of the beach, on how much certain beach iconographies contributed to the creation of a shared holiday image, not exempt from the risk of simplifications and clichés.
Archivio Balneare currently has over 150 Instagram posts where different registers alternate, both purely authorial and afferent to pop culture (music, tv and show business). A first inspiration was the Italian context of the 60s, when, thanks to the economic boom and increasing possibilities in mobility, there was a gradual spread of seaside tourism and vacationing became a mass phenomenon. This trend was well depicted in the cinema of the time, which at that moment was at the center of the media system: starting from Dino Risi’s masterpiece Il sorpasso (1962) until the long series of “seaside movies”, Italian comedies set on the beach, which showed the vices and virtues of a society renewed and reconciled in the name of consumerism. On the photographic front, from the same period is La lunga strada di sabbia (1959), a reportage on the new Italian vacations, with texts by Pier Paolo Pasolini and shots by Paolo Di Paolo.
Summer and seaside atmospheres often recur in visual arts, in varied times, places, and forms: from Luigi Ghirri’s Italian landscapes, with their dreamlike fixity, to the black and white of such cornerstones of the history of photography as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Vivian Maier or Robert Doisneau; from the romantic summers of Éric Rohmer’s movies to the great titles of contemporary cinema; passing through the contemporary gaze of young foreign photographers. One could go on much longer: a long visual itinerary along Italian and foreign coasts, which makes the research work a source of ever-new stimuli and discoveries.
