On September, after the earthquake in L'Aquila and Haiti, I left for Kabul in order to start this photographic project. I went there two times and on May i left for Iraq. The photographic research wants to investigate the relationship between identity and crisis as an index of development. Test out, through the architecture reconstruction and the landscape, the existence of a real difference between East and West, between globalization and fundamentalism, between democracy and forced security. This project is a collection of empty, something unresolved, ironic and provocative. This project is about my personal vision of reality.
"Not long ago, passing through the dreams gate, I visited that region of the Earth in which is the famous City of Destruction ". I always go back to this paragraph by Nathaniel Hawthorne and keeps me company.
I sometimes think that photography, is merely something to cling onto, representing at best an opportunity to go beyond time and space. This is a kind of paradox that takes courage. When the subject of your work changes, it gets the upper hand and grows freely, expanding and blending into every outer idea.
It’s difficult to shift your attention from finished work to reality under construction, and to what has been lost; to understand that collapse, rather than the consumption of development, competes with real life; to tell the story of one of the synonyms of emergency: reconstruction, the real side of our life. For this, somehow, from Kabul I come back to Milan, to l'Aquila with the same interrogative method. I'm always at a point of departure, waiting on the edge.
There’s not much left along with these photos, the conviction that the image, decontextualized, of the reconstruction describes an open work. A zero degree of memory. A similar global landscape.
I work with diptychs. Better with frames, with scrap. Better slowly. Because sometimes photography is that movie that stretches his time to the infinity. Maybe photography is always the same film, always going back to the “wild strawberry patchâ€. Somehow diptychs are scraps from that film. Are longest, slower.