16°52′ 02″ East, 41° 07′ 06″ North was originally commissioned in May 2001 by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage for the Arte Maggio, an international arts festival in Apulia, Italy. Inspired by a year spent at sea and by my return home after many years over seas, I decided to draw upon the Mediterranean for the project. I began my research with language, first with the dialect of my own region and then with those of the neighboring regions. I collected video interviews and photographs of people whose lives were deeply entrenched in the Mediterranean and were as rich and diverse as the subject matter itself: Balkan refugees, Italian fishermen, old ladies who hand made pasta, war survivors, Albanian child prostitutes and North African immigrants. As their stories unfolded, the ebb and flow of their experiences seemed to take on the current of the Mediterranean. Inspired by this, I transposed the sound of the voices into a soundtrack of the crashing waves of the Mediterranean, meshing the people and the place into one body.
After the gallery had closed for the evening, spectators could view a large projection of the Mediterranean on the exterior windows of the gallery. Exterior speakers were also installed to broadcast the fifteen-minute soundtrack, which (along with the projection) ran on a continuous loop throughout the night, until dawn. During the day, viewers could enter a secret room via the gallery, and listen to the fifteen-minute soundtrack through headphones. The gallery windows faced the sea and provided a voice and a reconnection to the land.