ABOUT

Terra Nostra is a photo essay on the effects of Mafia in Sicily. With my photographs I have endeavoured to document and capture the permanent scars inflicted by Cosa nostra on the Sicilian territory and the social context, victim and persecutor, of a system strongly rooted on fear and corruption. Born in Sicily myself, I started shooting Terra Nostra in 2009 and only now, after five years of work I finally found the project to be almost completed. The biggest challenge I had to face was to convey the legacy that Cosa nostra has imposed on the Sicilian people, the coasts permanently destroyed by illegal building speculation, the unsustainable economy resulted by a system based on extortion and corrupted public competitions of a broad capitalist monopoly of the crime families, and that sense of claustrophobic lack of freedom one can sense throughout the territory. A man standing on a vandalised bus stop in Palermo represents the haunted features of a degraded society.

— Mimi Mollica