DELTA

The Danube Delta is the largest among European river deltas. Located in Romania’s easternmost region bordering Ukraine, its territory is the last frontier of Europe.

Located at the easternmost point of the European Union, between Romania and Ukraine, the Delta is the continent's last frontier: an isolated, wild and almost unpopulated territory. Surrounded by ice in winter and water in summer, the inhabited areas are accessible only by boat, poorly connected to each other and often lacking basic services. The few inhabitants live in solitude, far from everything, in symbiosis with the sense of emptiness that marks their daily life.

To a foreign eye, the Delta seems only a strip of wet, mobile earth, devoid of real consistency, neither explorable nor livable. Never before passing through it for the first time had I experienced such a sense of bewilderment. Nothing was familiar to me. The solitude of Delta’s landscape amplified my deepest fears and fantasies.

This is why I decided to return, obsessively, for four years.

I wanted to face, live and dominate the Delta to inhabit as if it were my home.

Delta is the story of a conquest process, the testimony of my need to tell the story of two parallel labyrinths, one real, geographical, the other interior, emotional.

Photography was my tool to understand the reality I had before me and the engine that helped me overcome the loneliness and fear that limited my movements. Driven by the need to observe, more and more closely, ever more deeply, I faced the landscape, its inhabitants, and their inner world.

Intentionally oscillating between anthropological observation and symbolic transfiguration, I explored the landscape like a real labyrinth. Going deeply into it I came to perceive it as a familiar place is what directed my research, what helped me move towards new questions that explore the meaning of the act of Inhabiting. Inhabiting a territory, inhabiting a labyrinth, inhabiting oneself.