Don't forget the Knifish

In my search for my father, photography became a means of poetic interpretation and a way to reconstruct my own memory, to reconfigure the past and reappropriate the history that had escaped from me.

When I was twelve years old, my mother told me that the father I had known until then was not my biological father.

She told me about a trip she made in the early 1980s and about a young soldier she had met on the coast of the Red Sea at the foot of Mount Sinai.

That day I discovered that an essential part of my identity was a secret, that triggered strong and deep emotions within me.

For a long time, I did not know if I should open the Pandora‘s box that undermined the fragile balance between my family members.

In January 2019, I met my father for the first time, I was 26 years old at the time. The uncertain journey took me to Israel

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I used the camera as a shield when I faced him for the first time. It helped me deal with this emotional experience, and at the same time it gave me the courage to take that first step.

In my search for my father, photography became a means of poetic interpretation and a way to reconstruct my own memory, to reconfigure the past and reappropriate the history that had escaped from me until then.

The camera was primarily a tool of introspection; I observed my body to find traces of my father‘s heritage. I relied on my feelings to enter into a process of metacognition, becoming both object and subject.

My story is told from the point of view of a teenager who grows up with many unanswered questions and who, through the fragments he has about his father, loses himself in a world where imagination seems to mix more and more with reality.