Mimmo Cozzolino, Arcadia del Sud
Arcadia del Sud #01, detail, 2003
ARCADIA DEL SUD SERIES
The Arcadia del Sud series of seven images won the 2003 Leica/CCP Documentary Photography Award. I released another three images in this series around 2006.
Ever since I was a kid I have been recording the world around me with a camera– not in any systematic way, but as the need and spare cash dictated. For the first few years I used my Dad’s viewfinder camera.
In 2003 I went through the old negatives and transparencies from my teenage years and rediscovered a number of photographs afresh.
Arcadia del Sud is a digital reworking of a series of shots I took in the mid to late 1960s which I now particularly like because they show my parents literally basking in their new-found economic freedom as New Australians in the land I have called Arcadia del Sud, Italian for Arcadia of the South.
These images show my Mum and Dad in their recently (1965) purchased brick veneer home in the Victorian Housing Commission estate of West Heidelberg.
They are proud of their garden, chooks and of the new second-hand Austin Freeway in the drive. All this they achieved a mere five to six years after arriving in Australia in 1961.
Arcadia del Sud with its visible economic trappings is, on the surface, a picture of suburban simplicity, innocence and bliss. But to my mind, it was and will always be a lonely and culturally isolated and deprived place for my parents to inhabit. Leading to depression and cultural displacement. This is the enormous sacrifice most first generation migrants make. This work is dedicated to my parents. mc (The words above are my artist’s statement from my 2003 entry)