About the project

Italian migration to Scotland from the late nineteenth century to the present day has transformed the cultural and physical landscape of Scotland in many ways. Incontri aims to chart some of those transformations through their haphazard capture in the photographic image. Bringing together a disparate selection of images, our project presents the encounter between Italy and Scotland from new and unexpected perspectives. It is a project about place and about people.

The research process behind Incontri has taken shape in fragments, through archival records, handed-down stories and written histories. Together, these sources give form to this past as it is encountered in the exhibition’s photographs. Sometimes this process leads to information gaps, incomplete narratives and dead ends, which may themselves tell us something about lives lived between languages, places and identities.

While the experiences of Italians on the West Coast, Glasgow and Edinburgh – their entrepreneurial success, cultural legacies, culinary ventures and wartime hardships – are well documented, commemorated, and celebrated, other histories are more  difficult to trace. These are stories that resist or fall outside familiar narratives and geographies. What emerges following these ‘other histories’ is not a linear, uniform narrative, but a varied and negotiable history, found in dispersed forms where the potential errors, silences and missing pieces invite both careful examination and imaginative reconstruction. In this way, fragmentation becomes not a limitation but a method – a means of engaging with unwritten and untold stories, alongside those fondly remembered and retold time and again.

The photographs are sourced through HES, others from local newspapers, civic archives and popular memory collections. Some were taken by professional or commercial photographers, others are amateur, family snapshots. Often, they are unauthored, their photographer unknown. While the Internet makes old photographs more accessible and digital technology allows people to create and share their own stories as they happen, other images are preserved, maybe discarded, often unseen, in family albums, drawers, suitcases, or plastic bags.

We hope that the photographs act as prompts for thinking critically and creatively. We never take what the images show for granted. Often, it is the small, seemingly insignificant detail that hosts a hidden story. Sometimes it’s what isn’t in the photograph that says the most.

Incontri is generously funded by Historic Environment Scotland.