“The East Door” is a photographic project born with the aim to investigate and show that the structure of the stazzo, meant as the house and the surrounding fields, a socio-economic cell of the Gallurese rural society up to the first half of the 60s, constitutes still today an element of originality and of interest, even if it has lost, in many cases, its originary function.
A selection of black and white and colour images synthesises the environment situation, the landscape, the structure and the humanity of the observed reality.
During the research, in the phase of the photographic work, I have been visited more than 200 stazzi distributed on the whole of the gallurese territory. The next phase of the selection shows a champion of about 60 stazzi, present on a vast area, which includes marine and hills regions, zones in proximity of inhabited or isolated centres, in the attempt to reconstruct the panorama as exhaustively as possible of the differences in the natural contexts, and in the landscapes where they are collocated; the small yet existing differences in the architectural structures and in those concerning the uses and the actual destinations of usage of these territories and structures.
A tale of images of the conditions affecting the Gallurese agro today, and the humanity that everyday works and lives there, or who simply pass through, possessing only portions they exclusively destine as non-usual dimoras or seaside houses. An analysis on how and how much globalisation has ‘contaminated’ the landscape, the architecture, the economy and the social life of Gallura; the zone of Sardinia with its most anthomorphised and ‘invaded’ coasts of the island, and how, at the same time, the same zone presents some traditional, resisting, sometime musealized and eventually ri-contestualised, elements, to which has been given new vitality.

Today to photograph this contest means to freeze the status quo, looking for the residual signs of the proximate past still almost imperceptible present, the brandelli of a memory, which is alive even if, perhaps, for a short time; it means to investigate these residual signs but, at the same time, to focus on the probable direction the future will develop accordingly, in these communities and places.
Today to photographing the reality of the stazzo is an attempt at satisfying the thirst of memories which are close about in exhaustion, weak actualities in rapid change, trying to understand a near future.

The ‘Janna’, the entrance door of the stazzo, was always placed on the wall facing east-south, protected by the dominant winds

The photographic material of “The East Door” has been, for the majority of cases, produced in one year of work, between 2010 and 2011, during a photographic session aimed at the realization of a corpus of images of elevated artistic and documentary quality, to be destined to the Regional Centre of the Catalogue, finanzied by Regione Autonoma della Sardegna, curated by I.S.R.E., Istituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico della Sardegna (Sardinia Regional Ethnographic Institute).