THE WINTER OF MY YOUTH
My mid-thirties witnessed the collapse of my certainty. My life became twisted and spiralled into an easy instinct of self-destruction. I needed out. I decided to leave to take ownership of my future. Postwar Italians followed the same path. They used to be called ‘Wop’ – Without Official Papers. They perceived the new world as the land of freedom and opportunity, for me it was just the last resort to be able to leave some footprints.
I started questioning the pattern of human mobility in the light of my privilege. I looked into the Blackbox of my life. For a minute, I thought I could just reset my past and start over again. I was wrong. The shadow I casted at home, is the same I cast everywhere, even after building a fortress.
I began collecting these photographs to confront the anxiety of the unknown and the inexorable ticking of time. The separation from my roots came with an increasing sense of endless suspension, at times mitigated by blurry flashbacks resembling a distant present no longer mine. The frames in this series compose a personal stream of consciousness hung between the fragility of the memory and the unease of the moment. Each image draws from my mundane reality to allegorize my subconscious and unveil the half-truths I have always fed myself.
The Winter of My Youth is the visionary tale of a generation cheated by Italy, fooled by its melodramatic social fabric, and abruptly woken up by the third millennium in a different country on the threshold of adult age.
"Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried."
William Shakespeare