Nella Tarantino takes us through her Mediterranean and tells us about the nostalgia and intensity she perceives next to its waves.

“I have never sailed the oceans, “I have always been faithful to the Mediterranean”.

To its docks, to its islands, the waves, the winds, its clouds, the sunsets here from the side facing the Tyrrhenian Sea,to lighthouses, ports, its ships, departures and returns.
If I photograph the sea, the Mediterranean Sea, it’s because I’m full of nostalgia.

From its banks, on its banks, gigantic logs like column drums emerge from the sand of the mouth of time, while a menacing cloud rises high to hide a sunset.
Ghost-vessels ply silver waters, sometimes it lights up like an apparition.
And then islands, and ridges and mists and wakes and lightning and distances and piers and high waves that break and rise, and marine battles, and corroded rocks like submerged menhirs of lost civilizations, and flights of seagulls over dark waters like petrolium,
and infinite solitudes, on the desolate shores forgotten boats, residues, disassembled and rusty pylons, erased and confused signs.
On a desolate dune a dog turns his back to the sea, solitary Argo who no longer awaits Ulysses, plastic sheeting and huts oblivious to the ancient sanctuaries.
A grieving Penelope, with a gypsy sadness, wraps the sheet of a wedding bed that will never again see the happiness of the past.

The Mediterranean is a sea of nostalgia, of shipwrecks.
I photograph the sea in those moments when I don’t want to meet other faces, don’t look for them anymore.
Getting lost inside myself, elsewhere, out of time.
I stand still, waiting, the instant expands.
I wait for a long time, alone, in front of the sea.”

Nella Tarantino, September 2, 2023