The origins of the project date back to the year 2007. Mattia Insolera sailed away from Italy with a friend who wanted to cross the Atlantic Ocean on a sailboat. After two weeks of navigation he realised he was more interested in life on the shore rather than the mere task of sailing. He dropped down in the Strait of Gibraltar and there he had a first glimpse of a truly Mediterranean environment, a world inhabited by seamen and dockers, smugglers and migrants. He decided to devote the next years of his life to a comprehensive photographic project about Mediterranean culture.
Soon after he moved to Barcelona to be in a place well connected to its shores. From there he was able to reach 13 Mediterranean countries, traveling on any kind of boat, from sailing to cargo, and covering 25.000 Km with his motorbike.

Nowadays most of the people know the Mediterranean for being a paradise of sea, sun and blue sky. Belonging to this area Mattia Insolera felt the urge to scratch the surface of this touristic cliché and try to capture the real essence of this space.

The Mediterranean of the XXI Century has become divisive: a barbed wired fence between the North and the South of the world. It is also the basin where the major conflicts of the world are taking place, a dangerous passage for those who flee from misery and war and even a cemetery for 20.000 migrants that sunk in its waters in the last 20 years. It wasn't always like this. In the past this inner sea was inclusive: a bridge connecting shores and different cultures, a fertile soil for the very first civilisations. According to the Turkish writer known as the Fisherman of Halikarnassos, it was a Sixth Continent, distinct from the arbitrary five continents of geographers, assimilating people coming from the antipodes of the earth, turning them into Mediterraneans. Mattia Insolera wanted to find out if something remained of that time so he focused his camera on people who still use the sea as a surface for transportation, a working place, an area of exchange, in other words, people who still experience the sea as a Sixth continent.

“The Mediterranean area is the frontier between the North and the South of the world, the bastions around Fortress Europe. A new Iron Curtain that contains people on one side, whilst goods travel freely. Goods travel without restriction in colorful iron boxes, piled over floating iron cities, marked with a code that tells their past and their destiny and works as a permission of free circulation.”
Mattia Insolera