Marika Grimaldi has been photographing Puglia for years without ever really deciding, at least at first, to turn it into a project. Born and raised in that region, she now lives in Milan, and the distance seems to have given her a sharper eye on what was, for a long time, simply home. Her work moves between photography, video, analogue and digital, and it always starts from the same impulse: telling through images what she finds harder to put into words.

Before being a photographer, Marika Grimaldi was (and still is) someone who draws. Drawing remains the starting point for everything: from there she opened up to different languages, choosing each time whichever medium felt closest to what she wanted to tell.

For the past few years she has been carrying forward a project made across different summers spent in Puglia. “I was simply photographing whatever caught my eye and felt familiar to me,” she says. It was only later, looking back at the images together, that she recognised a fil rouge running through those scattered shots. 

One detail sets this work apart from so many glossy narratives about southern Italy: for Marika Grimaldi, the Puglia summer isn’t an aesthetic, it’s a body responding to precise stimuli. The heat that settles on the skin and sometimes wears you down, the dry earth, the noise of people at the markets and village festivals, the sea, the ripe fruit, bodies exposed to the sun. These are all physical elements before they’re compositional ones, and photography becomes the tool that fixes them without betraying them.

Asked about the meaning of this work, Grimaldi is clear that she doesn’t consider it finished yet. It stays open in this way, like a diary that keeps updating itself every summer, bearing witness not only to how the places she photographs change, but above all to how her own eye changes.