My practice is rooted in walking as an artistic method where body, route, and landscape are inseparable. In 2026, I will enter its most intensive phase: a sustained act of walking that I will prepare through months of artistic development. This will take the form of around 3,000 km nomadic journey around Iceland, entirely on foot with a custom-built, solar-powered trolley. Along the way, I will gather photographs, videos, sound recordings, archival pictures of objects, audio and written observations, building a comprehensive artistic archive.
Earlier in my career, beginning with a walk on the Orkney Islands 20 years ago, travel served as an unspoken backdrop. I moved through landscapes and societies to take photographs, with the journey's choices, constraints, and demands remaining invisible. In recent years, also with the development of the trolley, my practice has shifted toward a form of field-based research where the act of walking, the encounters along the way, and the states of mind they generate become integral to the work.
This approach is "in itinere", developed during walks of increasing duration: 360 km in the Australian rainforest, 560 km across the Shetland Islands, and 1,000 km through Norway, resulting in the short film Like a fern between rocks, selected for the Frome International Climate Film Festival, Beyond Cars Festival and Premio Corto Montagna in 2025 as time-based visual art.
I took a pause in 2025 to reflect on the deeper frameworks of my practice, engaging with Rebecca Solnit's critiques of heroic narratives in Wanderlust and her vision of walking as "a mode of making the world as well as being in it". This period also allowed me to explore more fully Frédéric Gros' assertion that walking "suspends time, interrupts work, and breaks with everyday routines" (A Philosophy of Walking). Stepping back from the field renewed both my mind and spirit, and I now return with a sharper sense of purpose.
This methodology draws from performance art, site-specific installation, and environmental art, echoing the lineage of artists like Hamish Fulton and also integrating it with Iceland's related environmentalist writers like Andri Snær Magnason, but extending it with a multi-sensory, logbook-building form.
In my walking practice, I see technology as a quiet ally rather than an intrusion. I work with whatever tools I can build or adapt, from solar power systems to modular engineering, to help me endure the physical demands of long and remote journeys. For the Iceland walk, I will adapt the trolley I designed to carry my equipment with an engine (allowing me to walk hands free), to be used as a shelter and further ideas are scheduled. Even though Hamish Fulton's walks in Iceland remain an important reference for me, especially his focus on the walk as the work, my approach places technology within that frame, using renewable energy and DIY solutions to help me focus more on other topics. In this way the trolley becomes both a survival tool and a companion, bridging the endurance and meditative qualities of walking with the possibilities of contemporary tools and ecological awareness.
The gradual shift toward Arctic environments emerged both from practical necessity, as walking proves easier in colder climates, and personal history: growing up in Naples under Mount Vesuvius' shadow, I've always questioned how other communities coexist with geological forces. This walk will also align with the rare total solar eclipse of summer 2026, a singular moment to experience and document in solitude, to be included in my future works.
As I prepare, I hold these questions for seeing, keeping me awake to what the walk might offer: How will months of walking fracture and reshape time? Is exhaustion a path to discovery or just a romanticized struggle? What remains when everything nonessential falls away? These are not problems to solve but ways of looking that keep the work alive.
Beyond financing, institutional support represents vital recognition, enabling this demanding journey as an open field of artistic inquiry. With such support, I will develop a significant new body of work through months of endurance walking through Iceland's shifting landscapes, laying the foundation for future artistic projects that may include presentations, installations, or other forms of sharing.
