Image and place. Which relationships?

This contribution aims to deepen the two following questions: 1. Is there a link between images and places? and 2. Can images be a way through which communities self-represent their identity and a condition for their growth? The paper proposes to understand a place not as an “empty container,” totally manipulable by the influences impacting it, in particular the economic ones, but as a “highly complex living organism” in which images are the expression of the internal history of a place, and then of its identity. Moreover, as images must be seen as a basic level of community self-representation, the paper proposes to activate a “workshop on the images of the place” in which the participants, using loosely structured methodologies, try to elaborate the deep symbolic and emotional meanings present in the territory identity. As the images are capable of capturing the feeling of a place, they can express its potentialities. In this way, the workshop is an opportunity to allow the growth of the place and of the community, and a way to predict the future by making the past speak.