The Coast as a Cultural System

A coastline is rarely just geography. It is a system where nature, infrastructure, and culture negotiate constantly — where a stretch of sand can be a free beach, a managed concession, a marina, or a protected shore, and each of these forms carries its own values, memories, and social codes. Flesh Sand treats the coast as this kind of system: not a backdrop, but a live archive of how a society organizes itself around a threshold.

The Beach as Threshold

Anthropologically, the beach is a threshold — a physical and symbolic border between land and sea, between the everyday and a form of suspension from it. It is crossed by collective rituals: the swim, the walk, the tending of the body, the sociability of summer. In their apparent simplicity, these rituals create a rare space of symbolic equality, where bodies and environment meet with little mediation. Seen from above, that relationship becomes legible in a way it never is from the sand itself — densities, boundaries, and the quiet choreography of a crowd resolve into pattern.

Method

Each location entering the archive is read through a six-layer verbal taxonomy — Territorio, Corpo, Identità, Natura, Tempo, Logica Aerea — built by the author to register a place's terrain, its bodies, who occupies it, its relationship to nature, its temporal rhythm, and what only the aerial view discloses. No codes, no shorthand: every category is written as plain, literary language, legible on its own. Aerial photography is the instrument of this method, not its subject.

Positioning

Flesh Sand does not read the coast as scenery, nor as a subject for denunciation. It stays close to an analytical, comparative method — faithful to what a place actually shows, place by place, without importing a single moral verdict onto all of them. Begun in Italy and now extending through Spain, Portugal, and France, the project finds its philosophical frame in Glenn Albrecht's Symbiocene: the hypothesis of a phase of reconciliation, not only crisis, between people and the environment they inhabit.