Bare Land
Scenario of actions in retreat during the Operation Husky, 1943
Bare Land is a photographic research commissioned for the eightieth anniversary of the Allied landing in Sicily during WWII in 1943. It develops along the lines of my personal research on the Sicilian landscape as a documentation of identifiers regarding the meeting of continental plates.
Indeed, from a geological point of view, Sicily is substantially formed by the subduction processes concerning the African and the European tectonic plates. In this sense, therefore, the artifice approaches to the historical analysis according to which the Allied landing was a direct consequence of the North African campaign. Culminated in the Casablanca Conference where it was decided to conduct a naval military operation never before attempted, that is to say a military landing on enemy territory (a general rehearsal for the best known and celebrated one in Normandy exactly one year later).
At the same time, I wanted to investigate, in detail, what actually were the Operation Husky’s military phases. A book published by the Historical Office of the General State of the Italian Army, Alberto Santoni’s “Operazioni in Sicilia e Calabria”, proved to be a fundamental scientific support. The monograph closes with a brutal list of data that make the myth of a sudden surrender to the military superiority of the Allied problematic at the very least. In just over thirty days the human losses of the Sicilian campaign were exorbitant: more than 4,500 Germans and 36,000 Italians were missing, including the confirmed deads who were buried and those estimated to be in mass graves; Allied forces suffered more than 4,000 field casualties and more than 20,000 deaths from malaria. Authentic carnage against which the phenomenon of Italian desertions should be seriously rethought! Not to mention the civilian casualties: Sicily, starting from the Pelagian islands, was literally buried by aerial bombardments.
Not wishing to compete with collections such as the National Archives in Washington and the Imperial War Museum in London, whose photographic documentation of aerial bombardments and naval shelling is extraordinary, I limited my operational scope to documenting the scenarios of the fighting between the opposing divisions. Therefore, to avoid excessive redundancies, I did not shoot, except in some sporadic cases, anthropic elements attributable to the time of the landing; here again, archive photographs of towns and cities in rubble are unsurpassing. I preferred, as far as possible, to focus on the aspects that best distinguish the morphology of the landscape: river courses, orogeneses, water basins, subsidences. All environmental characteristics in a war which, while waged with increasingly advanced technological weaponry, proved decisive in the military tactics of the frontal clash.
The final result is a sort of monument, a genuine photographic memorial, in its grid composition, either in sequence, or as a single shot, of the landscapes that were the theatre of war. These are presented in the form of environmental surveys regardless of, and in opposition to, the human destinies that were determined there and which are reported in the epigraphs. Their disposition follows the dramatic unfolding of the Operation Husky, the crossing and perimeter of the geological emergences of Sicily, in the progressive retreat of the Axis troops towards the Strait.
Federico Baronello 