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The Artist Statement:
Stuck in a black hole that was hard to get out of. I am Italian and that means that everyone tell young people to find a “safe” job that gives them a “safe” salary to allow them to create a “safe” family and guarantee their children a “safe” future. This is the mentality.
I was also ending up in that “safe” one. But then one evening, coming home from work, I thought: “I am 23 years old and I am sad. However can I be sad at 23?” And then I understood why. I woke up every morning and did the same things every day surrounded by people who after having done the same things for 20 years said they were bored but that they could not change anymore. It is clear that it wasn’t fine with me and I thought that if I wanted to change what was around me I would have to change myself first and so I asked myself: “But who am I?”
A dance class wasn't enough to understand it, it had to be a much more radical change. So I left. First for England where I studied English and then for the United States where I worked as an Au Pair for almost 2 years. There were many difficulties such as loneliness, adaptation, living with a different culture for so long, the difficulty of making friends because I did not know the language well and the embarrassment and scomfort of living with the same people you work for. However day after day you learn a lot and you gain more courage. In my case I learn what "love" means from a kid, how talk to strangers, make new friends and study a new passion. And the awareness of never stopping learning makes me free.
In my culture, change is scary because it is anything but "safe", while, for me, it allows me to evolve, be amazed and feel free. It is not right to feel "wrong" or "different" in the society in which you are born and raised just because you do not do everything that others do, therefore life is only one and everyone deserves to live it as they see fit. Everyhting is possible if you really want it.
To create this photographic narrative I took photos from my archive and chose them in such a way as to highlight both the negative and positive sides of the chosen concept, recreating a sort of linear narrative, telling the passages that occurred from feeling blocked to feeling free. The photos were all taken with the iPhone, the medium of our era.
