N-1387 / F-1386

Fifty years ago, a train linked Southern Italy with Switzerland. On board were seasonal workers—mostly men—headed for temporary jobs across the Alps. In those years, James Schwarzenbach rose to prominence in Switzerland for his campaign against Überfremdung—what he described as the excessive presence of foreigners. Although his 1970 referendum was ultimately rejected, it paved the way for restrictive immigration policies: migrant workers were allowed to stay no more than nine months a year, with limited rights and without their families.

This photographic exhibition focuses on two symbolic locations along that migratory route: the province of Taranto, the point of departure, and Locarno, the point of arrival. There are no portraits, no faces—only spaces, architecture, and rural and urban landscapes that still bear silent traces of those stories. The images speak of difficult departures, of distance, of lives suspended between roots and an uncertain future. Geometries, traces, and architectural details evoke the hardship, hope, and sacrifice of a precarious existence.
No rhetoric, no idealization—only a visual testimony of a past that still questions the present. Because that wave of migration is not a closed chapter, but a reflection of dynamics that remain very much alive. Migration remains at the heart of political and cultural tensions. In the absence of faces, it is the places themselves that bear witness—silent memories of departures, waiting, and daily struggles on the margins.