Lontano
2016-2019
I am Italian and have been living in France for 13 years. I didn’t choose France by francophilia, but almost a litte bit randomly, or as a bet: when I arrived, I didn’t even speak the language. After so many years spent in this country, I feel that the experience of the distance – not to say the uprooting – even when it takes place in a country geographically and culturally close to the one in which we grew up, seems to me to be an extremely rich, even unavoidable, experience for an human being. It is precisely from this shifted perspective that this series started, from an idea of Italy as a country that remained off screen to me for so many years and that I finally decided to reframe, in order to compose images from the reality seen through the viewfinder of my camera.
I wanted to meet people, through generations and institutions: At school, in prison, in the Asian community, in the workplaces, in trade unions and political demonstrations, through celebrations and Carnivals, always seeking a fair distance from the past and present of a country that I belong to but is at the same time no longer mine, a country whose sky could be that of a distant place and where the sensations, the music of the language, the colours and flavours, from familiar had become almost exotic to me, because memory has crystallized them into something that no longer exists.
