In the inland of Sardinia, far from the coast and the tourists, Florence-and-Berlin duo succco made An Island Within the Island, chasing what survives of a folk medicine once kept mostly by women.
Before the Second World War, most medicine in Sardinia was the unofficial kind. Healing lived inside the community as a shared body of knowledge, and the people who carried it were mostly women, known for rituals that went past any empirical treatment, weaving prayer into gestures of white magic. In the autumn of 2022, Michael Francalanci and Francesco Bagattini travelled through the Sardinian inland to see what remained of the practice.
The plan was a reportage. What they found refused to sit still for one. Following a chain of people, roads and questions, the two ended up somewhere they had not gone looking for, what succco describes as “a hidden Sardinia, an island within the island, far from tourism and suspended between tradition and modernity.” The title names a place no map shows, an interior island folded inside the familiar one.
Back home with the photographs and the recorded voices, the duo abandoned the reportage entirely. In its place they set images and fragments of text side by side as equals, “neither illustrating nor explaining the other.” Neither the picture nor the line beside it is asked to caption its neighbour, and each is left to carry its own weight.
The withholding is deliberate. Names of places and people are mostly left out, so that no single village or face pulls focus, and what remains, in the duo’s phrase, is “a choral, village-Sardinia in which each voice contributes to a shared story.” It has become the way succco works: from attraction rather than knowledge, going after traces of ritual, identity and transformation in places caught between past and present.
The pair returned in the spring of 2024 to continue and widen the project, which remains ongoing. An Island Within the Island is also where succco began, the work that turned two travellers into a duo and taught them a slower way of moving, listening and telling. Far from tourism, it holds out for the other Sardinia, the one that keeps its cures, its prayers and its silences to itself.
