For six years Jean-Marc Caimi and Valentina Piccinni returned to the olive groves of Puglia while Xylella fastidiosa moved through them. The bacterium, identified in the Gallipoli area in 2013, has no known cure; millions of trees have been felled to slow its spread northward, and the farmers doing the cutting were destroying their own history, culture and livelihood. Fastidiosa, published by Overlapse in 2022, is the record of that long attendance.

The book works in two registers. Black-and-white analogue portraits and landscapes carry the human and agricultural cost; colour photographs follow the laboratories and field trials, among them experiments grafting still-living wild olive shoots onto more productive varieties in the search for a resistant tree. Interviews give the growers a public voice, and archival photographs and residents’ words are woven into the sequence rather than appended to it.

The mixture is deliberate. Caimi and Piccinni’s approach is careful rather than sensational; working under the project title This Land Is My Land, they stay close to individual farms, so the epidemic reads as a set of specific losses rather than an abstraction. The physical book supports that argument: 228 pages, mixed art papers, a double fold-out, a section-sewn softcover. Overlapse, the London imprint founded in 2015, has built a practice of giving such long-form documentary work a considered printed form.

For collectors of documentary and environmental photobooks, the interest lies in the combination — sustained access to a community across six years, a dual palette that separates testimony from research, and a structure that treats archive and spoken word as part of the photographic argument. It is the first edition, in English, of a crisis that is still unfolding, and it proceeds with the patience of a long project rather than the pace of reportage.