The exhibition title clearly echoes the song of little Mignon, the protagonist of Goethe’s Bildungsroman "Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre", while at the same time recalling a visual quiz with prizes—“Kennst du deine Heimat? Conosci la tua Provincia?”—which the Cassa di Risparmio di Bolzano dedicated to students for two decades starting in the 1970s. Distributed in local schools, the booklet contained 18 photographic quizzes on a variety of subjects such as local culture, geography, and history.
To engage with the bilingual term Heimat/Provincia, which carries different semantic nuances, Salvà—an artist from South Tyrol—turns to the Land of Goethe’s Grand Tour to visually depict the landscapes of his birthplace. With his impeccable analogue approach, he invites the local audience to recognize their own geographies, while at the same time presenting forests, peaks, and lakes that could just as easily belong to other latitudes.
At the heart of the artist’s poetic inquiry lies the fragile relationship between humankind and nature. Salvà renders landscapes of extraordinary beauty—despite their desolation—through a vivid reproduction of colors and details. Technically, he draws on the visual language of the great twentieth-century masters of photography, adopting stylistic elements à la manière de Edward Burtynsky, Eliot Porter, Stephen Shore, and Ansel Adams, to name a few. Likewise, the construction of some of his images evokes the canvases of the great Renaissance painters.