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(2010-2019)

Almost, 2019, artist’s residency c/o ArtArcadia, Derry, UK

Almost is a project realised in Derry. Learning its topography by heart, studying its
history, geography and literature, I have mixed surreal views and vistas with my own reconstructed. The city, it becomes the subject of memory, historical and personal, but also of imagination, perhaps the happiest means, to transcend the heavy past and live in the present, nonetheless dark, thanks to the clashes caused by Brexit and the aftermath of the Northern Ireland conflict which has generated Catholic and Protestant quarters, often forcing Catholics into an apartheid regime.
Rather than questioning a possible future or investigating the state of affairs, I sought to move beyond documentation and history, imagining an ideal city, recognisable to its inhabitants but which would also prove to be new to them in some respects, to be rediscovered, thus providing a new point of view of
observation and imagination: even those who know it through media images can
discover a mild and less hostile place that decades of photos of clashes have conveyed to us. Those who have never seen it, can do so through a new point of view. From ‘a colony in Europe’, as it was nicknamed along with the whole of Northern Ireland, to a ‘colony of the imagination’, a figurative place which becomes a foothold of empathy, equality and peace, precisely because it is super partes.

Per Umbriam ad astra, 2018 Special project, UmbriaMICO, Perugia

Umbria is a land where the perception of time is on a human scale, where human relationships and the scarce physical distances intersect and favor each other; the perception of a time devoid of the sense of distance perceived in the large cities or regions, an enviable model of living that many wish to export elsewhere or that others choose after getting to know it. I told the story not of those who were born but of those who chose to live in Umbria. I created unusual postcards where I related, in a visual and semantical way, the images and words of those who gave me their story, juxtaposing set portraits with photos of decontextualized landscapes, which at times look like models, difficult to recognize except thanks to the words of those who told them; postcards-not postcards.

Topografia di una storia, site specific, Foligno, in collaborazione con ZUT!

 

Who am I 2017-2020, Special project, Strabismi Festival, Cannara

In the beginning is the Logos. At least for me. I always start from the word, one, many, or just an expressed thought sometimes. However, I start from visions. This is the case where the writing of others becomes for me a screenplay: an autobiographical text is the basis for a portrait. Perhaps the limits of the two genres here are mixed. I made this work thanks to Strabismi, a project about portraits, so, basically, a project about faces (a portrait is not just something that involves a face, but, perhaps, a story). To make those portraits I started from the autobiographies of the actors who succeeded each other on the festival stage – donated to me in any medium – so a project of meta-portraits… meta-authors? How much is there of the
subject and the photographer, in such a work? Who is who? Who am I?

365 giorni 2017-2018

365 days are a metaphor of an infinite time, of all the possible lives that identify us, sometimes disappointing ourselves and breaking into adulthood.
This project unveils unconscious dreams, personal traits, possible identity signs – sometimes subjective, sometimes collective. subjective, sometimes collective. Emerging broken emotions and other mature and aware that remain to shape a story-identity, half autobiographical, half dreamed and imaginative, which is inspired by writings and pages of diary and uses quotes from old movies, esoteric texts, images of family, geography, travel and sensations. Fragments that only happen once they are finished, this phase often coincides with the entrance into so-called maturity.

Elegia 2017

‘The elegy is characterized by subjects united by a diversity of content as opposed
to the epic.
‘(…) there is no already given external measurable reality, but on the contrary things. objects are colored by our experiences, they have meaning only when they express the meaning they have for us.’
Wikipedia
In this project, the only narrative component is the visual assonance between the images. I have taken slight images where the subjects are decontextualized, as in a dream, in a vision. Something that is not epic or narrative, but elegiac, poetic and dreamy. Something where it is not important what happens but just what appears to the eyes, no matter if in  its beginning or in its end, that remain both hypothetical.

ILDS 2015-2017

I have created my own personal and selected atlas of some archetypal symbols. There is no narrative aim but only a descriptive one: each image is made from one from a textual selection used on the book I was inspired by (“The Book of Symbols”) which functioned as a screenplay-didascalia. As in the inspirational book, I sometimes explicitly quoted or replicated from the existing works of art, more often I gave my own reading. Each image has its own sketch made by hand on tracing paper thus going on to create a small anthology multimedia out of a defined space-time.

Iperuranio, 2014-2015

5 Luoghi – foto

I have recreated ambiguous worlds. The viewer takes their existence for granted, yet the presence of foreign elements within those landscapes plants a seed of doubt about their authenticity. I focused on places rather than on landscape in a generic sense—each place is titled with a simple number. Nothing else refers to a defined geographic location—only hypotheses. But in truth, nothing is certain or assured, not even the actual existence of these places in the world.
Natural vs. artificial, true vs. false, reality vs. imagination.

Svanire – video + still

I chose imperfect footage to counterbalance the expertise of the photos. Along the lines of the concept of the photos, the videos focus on landscapes, particularly human landscapes. It’s like an ascent that starts from somewhat pleasant and strongly connoted places, like an amusement park, and then goes to gradually emptier and more abandoned places, ascending precisely, from the artificiality of the human landscape to the elements of nature. Everything that moves in these videos moves unnaturally to create an inverted and somewhat parallel world where what appears to be is not, since the  direct imaging are distorted, here, by editing.

Tabula Rasa, 2013

It stems from music and speaks of the re-discovery of self through the abandonment of burdens that no longer serve, passing through the sleep-dream, the stage when our body becomes heavy until it comes the dream and the oneironaute awareness. It closes with the post-krieg, tassels-macerie, of the battle concluded.

A senso unico, 2012

The project imagines by stages, visions and symbols, a spiritual journey and   vocation that only in second instance could lead to the realization of a physical pilgrimage. Taking inspiration from anecdotes and symbols related to the lives of St. Francis of Assisi and St. James, as well as using pagan and ancient symbols, I constructed a spiritual and mental journey. The pictures, horizontal and vertical, intersect: synchronic time and diachronic time, “time and eternity”, Kierkegard would say. The probability or otherwise of an actual journey taking place becomes symbolic of the fact that the journey is first and foremost personal and mental experience. The only thing certain on this journey is the uniqueness of direction, a metaphor for the artistic journey, understood as a creative process but also as a life choice.

Suitcase-da tempo immemore, dalla serie ‘Uno e infinito’, special project, Federalberghi, Perugia, 2012.

I feel like the world is not beautiful because it is varied. But that the world is beautiful because it’s always equal to itself, in its all and in the antonyms of its all (that really exist). Perhaps it is infinite because of because of the number of possibilities that each life brings with it. And it contains everything material and non material (think of how many imaginations it contains), thus also the antonyms of everything, material and nonmaterial. An almost infinite number of similar things complementary and contrary to each other. Each life is perhaps deja vu of itself and someone else. And so to infinity.

Soliloquio di una solipsista, 2011

By analyzing some experiences of doubles borrowed from literature, philosophy and psychology, I tried to arrive through the setting up of dual and complementary sets at solipsism. A path in which I chose to have myself portrayed as the subject of the photos, and which indicates a search toward the possible manifestations of the concept of doubles that one can run into. I closed the journey with solipsism, seen more as a conscious possibility as opposed to the various facets analyzed.

Chiedi alla polvere, 2010

My aunt lived in Puglia and then moved to Umbria. The Apulian house was my summer home and, once I entered the new Umbrian house, I was surprised to find out that there were the same smells, the same lights and the same atmospheres as the old house that was now about 700km away. My aunt left this house therefore I shot it even when empty, proceeding then to photograph the new house as well.