On a Mediterranean island 675 metres high, somewhere between thirty and sixty people live year-round. There is no hospital, no car, no priest, no police. Some residents never consider leaving; others leave and come back. That compressed society — its untold stories, its tangled family trees, its lore of bread baked with hallucinogenic grain — is the terrain Gabriele Chiapparini photographs and questions in Thinking Like an Island.

The book is credited to Chiapparini, with Camilla Marrese also named among its contributors, and it refuses the easy frame. Islands are usually rendered as utopia or as dystopia; this one is treated instead as a working system with moveable logic, where identity is continuously built out of clash and coexistence, choice and confinement, innovation and resistance. Diary extracts and quotations from residents sit alongside exploratory photographs of landscapes and portraits, so that testimony and image carry comparable weight in a poetic, philosophical argument about how a small place might explain a larger world.

The stakes are contemporary. As economic and social arrangements look less and less sustainable, the work asks whether an island — a place where everything is reduced to minimum necessity — might offer a way of thinking about survival rather than an escape from it. What results is stratified, plural, dense: a vertigo of accumulating complexity rather than a single clean thesis.

For a collector, the interest lies in how that thinking is built into the object. Overlapse has bound the material into an unconventional structure, so that sequence and page-turn do argumentative work rather than merely presenting pictures; the 224-page paperback, published in English in 2024 with a second printing in 2025, asks to be read as much as looked at. It rewards attention to editing — the placement of a resident’s sentence against a photograph of coastline — and to a body of work that treats a microcosm seriously enough to test it as a model.