Everything started accidentally, when a long exposure set for a shot, wasn’t modified for a following shot.
I was in a old abandoned mining village in the East Sardinia with some friends of mine. We were there to create a little documentary of the place. I’ve already composed the scene, thought about the shoot, and “clicked” using the remote control.
The shutter opened and since I expected it to close immediately, I walked in front of the lense, invading the composition of the photography. I stayed there angry with myself, thinking that I would have to shoot all over again. Then I looked at the display of the camera and saw an undefined profile, a shadow that quickly caught my attention. It filled the emptiness of a human presence that lived there before, giving it some kind of a soul and identity.
From that moment I have been involved in an ongoing research on how to use these abandoned backgrounds to tell a memory, a feeling, a fear or a situation in which all of us were or will be at least once in our lifetime.
I first thought that the shadow, impalpable entity with undefined outilnes, was the perfect way to represent this message. By continuing my research I realized soon that the same shadow, without a precise identity, allowed to anyone who interface with the shot to find himself in it. It gave an impersonal feature to an individual project with the intention, initially, to represent my feelings.
Also the abandoned places, full of pathos and past testimonies, have leading position inside my research. I’ve always been fascinated by them because they are the mirrors of changing times and guardians of memories.
I would describe this series as a “dreamlike reportage” that, despite a classic reportage that works on concrete parallels, wants to gravitate inside the cerebral domain trying to represent all of the feelings that, daily, pervade all of us.
