[ 18:39 wednesday 27 august 2014 – piscita, isola di stromboli ]

i’m sitting on paolo’s long terrace, dripping wet after swimming. the evening sun hovers low above the flank of the volcano. below me the sea is almost motionless. tiny waves lick and fizz against the black sand. the day’s hydrofoil from napoli creeps across the horizon, the growl of its powerful engines clearly audible in the shimmering air.

it’s twenty-nine months since my last entry in this journal. this has been a wondrously fertile period for me. seeds i’ve planted and tended over a decade are sprouting on every side. the trampery has grown from one building to four; spreading across software, fashion, design and the arts. two more buildings are due to open before the end of the year, including a spectacular new flagship in the centre of shoreditch. the trampery’s also part of a project to develop a completely new kind of “entrepreneurial community” integrating 500 apartments with 50,000 square feet of workspace, studios, cafes and event spaces. meanwhile after years of ups and downs trampoline systems has found a solid niche as a data analyst focused on business clusters. over the past year the company has won a string of landmark projects including one from the greater london authority to undertake the most detailed ever analysis of the region’s technology industry and one from the european commission to analyse europe’s entire startup ecosystem. finally one click orgs has launched the world’s first fully electronic co-operative, providing member-owned organisations where membership, voting and governance can all be managed online. i could happily write an essay on each venture but this journal exists to chart the personal journey rather than the entrepreneurial one.

two years have passed since i last set foot on this island of stromboli. after living here from july 2001 until july 2003 i’ve continued to come once or twice each year. the island became a second home for me, a parallel set of continuing relationships and experiences, an opposite pole to my frenzied life in london. stromboli was my safety valve, a retreat open to me whenever i needed it. here i could find the solitude and the immersion in wild nature which london denies. this second universe allowed me to throw myself into my work in london with a vigour that would otherwise have been impossible.

by my last visit in 2012 my relationship with the island felt out of balance. after coming here as a complete outsider in 2000 with he photographer fabrizio ruffo i’d gradually become an insider. my time with matteo sforza in 2010 accelerated the process by casting me as partner to someone who grew up in the community. without realising it i’d developed a sense of entitlement, feeling aggrieved if i wasn’t invited to certain parties or gatherings. this was ironic bearing in mind that during my two years living on the island i carefully maintained my status as an outsider and sought to avoid entanglement in the complex systems of obligation and affiliation.

i needed a break to reset my relationship with the island. the two year gap since my last visit has done the trick. when i arrived on the island last friday i felt like an outsider once again with a fresh sense of humility. during these days, as in my earliest visits, i have mostly sought solitude. during the afternoon i pass hours sitting alone on the black rocks bathed in the intense white blaze of sunlight watching the shimmering azure horizon. in the evenings i become more sociable, circulating around the village and visiting friends. i find myself eschewing parties in favour of smaller private gatherings. i feel close to my dearest friends again in a way i haven’t done for too long. everything has come back into focus.

this restoration of balance has manifested itself forcefully through my photography. from my earliest visits the camera was a catalyst for my exploration of the island and its people. behind the lens i would become entranced, completely absorbed in the delicate rhythms of light and colour around me. over the years the trail of images i left served as a record not only of my obsessive explorations of the island but also my changing relationship with it. one of the most unsettling aspects of the final years was the increasing difficulty i found to capture the inspiration which had arisen so effortlessly in the past. from this perspective my arrival on this visit was like my very first arrival. everything that had become familiar and over-explored was once again new and mysterious. 

this sense of a new beginning was heightened by having a new camera in my hands; indeed not just a new camera but a completely different photographic format. a couple of months ago i lost my faithful canon eos 3. instead of replacing it i started researching medium format cameras. the eos 3 subsequently reappeared but by that point it was too late to turn back. i spent a month trying to make sense of the byzantine variety of formats, bodies and lenses before concluding that i wanted a rolleiflex 6008i with a 6×6 back and a 40mm or 50mm lens. a happy combination of destiny and ebay then delivered me precisely what i sought. one evening a couple of weeks ago i cycled up across walthamstow marshes to collect a tightly packed box from a fellow called ibraam. i spent the next few days putting everything together and figuring out how it worked. after a week i felt confident enough to load my first film and take the camera blackberrying with some friends by the river lea. each roll of 120 film provides just twelve frames, each frame six centimetres by six centimetres square. this encourages a certain economy in usage. so far on stromboli i’ve used three rolls. the camera is considerably heavier and bulkier than the eos but this should be amply compensated by the quality of the images that result. of course until these first films have been developed i can’t be entirely sure i’m actually using it correctly. i half expect a set of blank images to be returned from the laboratory.

three weeks ago a lava flow formed on the side of the volcano, the first time this has happened since 2007. stromboli’s typical pattern of activity is three or four eruptions an hour from craters at the summit. this pattern switches to a lava flow if the pool of magma rises to the top of the cone. the last time i saw one was in january 2003 shortly after a massive explosion ripped the top off the mountain and a tsumami triggered the island’s evacuation. the opportunity to capture the new lava flow with the rolleiflex was an irresistible mission for the trip. just before sunset on monday i set off up the mountain with paolo and a group of friends. we’d ascended to around three hundred and fifity metres when we were stopped by a pair of guides who informed us that the mountain was closed above two hundred and ninety metres for safety. usually in these situations if a guide recognises you they’ll turn a blind eye but on this occasion they made it clear they weren’t budging until we turned round and descended. reluctantly we began to retrace our steps with the guides following at the rear. having lugged the camera so far and got so close to my objective i wasn’t going to let anything stop me. so i nonchalantly wound my way to the front of the group and waited for a sharp bend in the path then darted into the bushes and hid myself. once i was sure everyone had passed, including the guides, i returned to the path and continued the ascent. to avoid attracting attention i avoided using my torch, relying on starlight and peripheral vision to follow the path.

i spent the next five hours on the mountain, ascending to six hundred metres and being rewarded with a jaw-dropping experience of the lava flow. the fact i was the only person on the mountain made it feel even greater a privilege. it’s hard to express what it’s like to be so close to a lava flow. it’s like watching a massive incandescent creature, writhing its way across the mountainside, probing for new gullies to occupy, constantly in motion. whilst i watched a new channel formed and pushed its way down a hitherto dark section of mountainside. the lava was orange and red with brighter whites and yellows where the crust cracked exposing hotter material inside. in parallel with the viscous lava rocks were constantly solidifying and breaking off, rolling down the slope like incandescent snowballs, exploding with showers of sparks where they bounced. the visual spectacle was accompanied by an incessant fizzing, crackling, popping and banging. i could feel the heat on my face.

on this visit, as with so many previous visits, i am staying with my friend paolo russo on his estate at piscita. to a large extent the preservation of my sanity over these past ten years has been thanks to his hospitality. 

[ 13:32 wednesday 3 september 2014 – cinema mele, pizzo, calabria ]

on saturday afternoon pasquale dropped me at the port in stromboli and i hitched a lift to vibo marina on the return leg of a day-tripper boat from calabria. my friend giuseppe picked me up in his gorgeous 1970s fiat minivan (a 900 pulmino) and drove me back to pizzo. i’ve spent the last five days staying with him in the clifftop cinema his grandfather built in the 1950s.

cinema mele is an exquisite and miraculous survival of post-war italian architecture. one descends a narrow side street in the old city of pizzo to find a tall doorway at the end with “cinema mele” written above. the entrance opens into a grand marble-floored lobby with a huge square window offering a panoramic view over the sea. to the left one staircase ascends to a lobby at balcony level and another descends to a lobby at stalls level. tall teak-veneered doors open from each of these lobbies into the flank of the main auditorium which is twisted around to place the screen on the same side of the building as the entrance.

the walls and ceiling of the auditorium are covered with moulded white plaster panels in three different designs. the floor is polished concrete. the lower sections of the walls are painted brick red or cream. the doorways and windows are trimmed with red velvet pelmets and gold tassels. the auditorium seats 500 in rows of delicate curved plywood chairs mounted on thin steel legs. the staircases and balconies sport simple steel bannisters with a zigzag motif. at the rear of the auditorium a terrace runs the whole width of the building. from the edge of the terrace. at the edge of the terrace the cliff falls away to the sea a couple of hundred feet below.

the cinema fell out of use thirty years ago and has lain abandoned since then. for reasons nobody can fathom giuseppe’s great uncle had the windows removed. as a result the building has suffered. in places the reinforcing steel rods in the concrete structure have corroded and chunks of concrete have crumbled away. damp in the walls has caused paint to peel away and the rendering to bubble up. the velvet pelmets are rotted and hanging in tatters. leaks in the roof have stained a couple of the moulded panels. but overall the building has survived miraculously well. the cinema has never been refurbished so the building one experiences today is fundamentally as it was designed by giuseppe’s grandfather sixty years ago.

two years ago giuseppe took upon himself the epic task of bringing cinema mele back to life as an arts venue. over the last two summers he’s installed new electrical and plumbing systems, created a kitchen in the stalls lobby and started work to stabilise the building’s condition. in the process he’s turned its ruined aspects into sculptures and things of beauty. through the summer he lives here with the artists and performers he invites from around the world to collaborate in this extraordinary environment. his next challenge is to raise money to put in windows and waterproof the roof. my rolleiflex has been busy documenting the building in its current condition. i’m up to eleven exposed rolls now.

this evening i fly back to london and resume battle on my ventures. i feel ready for everything.

: c :