I had to shed my skin

Artphilein, 2022
Softcover, 27x22cm
104 pages, color photographs
English

What’s your homeland when you have no roots?

You were just born in a place you call home, but you have nothing to do with it. It just doesn’t feel yours.

You can only be looking for traces.
You take bits and pieces from the places you’ve lived in – as well as from your memories – and try to make them work together.

Traumatic events always change the perception of the world as well as the perception of ourselves within a particular space. They set a “before” and “after”, which cannot be avoided.

In 2012, after 13 years, I was forced to go back to my homeland after an important road accident I had whilst working in the Balkans. This is when I began to see this place in a different way.

I never felt a strong connection to that anonymous part of Italy, but I noticed that most of the things were bringing me back to my childhood. I have always had this ambivalent feelings of love and hate towards what I was supposed to call “home”.

I had to shed my skin is an investigation of themes such as homeland, family, roots, change and belonging and what they actually mean to me. I started looking for traces, taking bits and pieces from my personal and faded memories.
Suddenly, I felt the urge to regularly go back to make photographs of the place, to explore it like I never did in the past.

I was struck by the fact that so many things had drastically changed, whereas others had remained the same. My eyes were caught by these symbols that metaphorically recalled the idea of home, underlining how much I have changed throughout these years both as a person and as a photographer. Therefore, I have tried to adapt my new way of working through the landscape, without mentioning the actual place, and sequence the work in a way that would create “my own world” of what I had in front of me.

The series, which has become a book in May 2022, is the result of many road-trips to the region where I was born.