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SYNOPSIS

I went on a journey through my city, into the private, everyday universes of absolute strangers, moving around in their spaces, observing their objects, looking for their traces and imagining stories.

PRESENTATION TEXT

As in the case of other forms of the sharing economy, sharing housing between private individuals has rapidly spread so far and wide that it has begun to affect the organisation of communities. In increasing numbers of cities and countries, it has triggered heated political and economic debate on ways to manage and limit it. On the political side, there is clearly an intention to claim back part of the enormous profits for the community, but what does this new way of using apartments mean on personal level? Where does the “sharing” approach end and where does interest in the “economy” part begin? Where does one draw the ambiguous line between private and public, intimacy and coexistence?

I went on a paradoxical journey through my own city, Turin, in northern Italy, staying just one night in rooms I choosed, booked and payed for in the digital Airbnb platform, a technological-economical device that is capable of opening up others' private universes. The work is divided into home-nuclei, minimal visual narratives ranging between individual exprerience and voyerism, anthropological analyses and possible suggestions, symbolism and memories. The result is an attempt to decipher the traces of housing by means of a collection of signs, symbols and signals of a perceptive and object-based language of living, as though they were clues, even though with a meaning that is elusive and ustable, and not pre-established.

[The project was realized and produced in the frame of ABITARE, public photographic campaign commissioned by Mufoco–Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, La Triennale di Milano and MiBACT, Italian Ministry of Culture]