The Provinces platform was set up at a historical juncture (Brexit, Trump election), a disconcerting time for the major centres of the Western world. The disconcert arose, on the one hand, from the inability of the periphery (as it was once again described) to keep pace with what the centres considered to be the most pressing matters of the new era; and, on the other hand, from the incapability of these same centres to timely comprehend or foresee relevant trends and developments. Today, after some years have passed, this disconcert is still present in public discourse. But at the same time, at least in the minds of The Provinces’ founders, the need the platform could meet has also become clearer since then. We see The Provinces online platform as an interface for places without a centre around which to revolve like satellites. We also see it as a self-ethnographic platform.

The photography works presented in the Topo-anthropologies exhibition aim at giving the most representative idea possible of the outcomes of this project, whose goal is the constant redefinition of the term “province”. If we were to identify a common theme in the projects hosted, it would be interesting to highlight the element that was also chosen as the core subject of the present exhibition, based always on the platform’s material. It is the relationship between people and their environment, regardless of whether that environment is the product of anthropogenic activity or is treated as a natural landscape. It is about how people recorded by other people or self-reflecting by actively photographing, are intervening in and shaping the places around them, before they become shaped by them themselves. Their relationship with their surroundings is not a passive one, since their habitats still contain empty space which is conceived as neutral and lends itself to interventions or, in the worst case, to being used for the disposal of useless things. What drives these interventions is the need to survive, but often the guiding force can also be an intense need to showcase a specific cultural identity or individuality. Therefore, the place appears to be particularly decisive for these people. They realise and don’t deny that, even when they decide to build a replica of the Sydney opera in the middle of what the rest of us would call “nowhere”.