Nevermind if I'm Blind

After a breakup, I returned home, but it felt foreign and hostile. By photographing its nights with flash, I tried to reclaim it. Yet each frame asked: has the place changed or have I?

After the end of an important relationship, I felt the urge to return to my hometown: Montella.
It’s a small village in southern Italy, seemingly suspended in time.
But when I came back, it felt unfamiliar.
The place that had raised me, once a safe and intimate refuge for over twenty years, now seemed distant, ambiguous, almost hostile.
Everything had shifted toward the margins: my gaze, my presence, the things I once recognized.
I could no longer find my place at the center. I started looking to the edges, the cracks, the grey zones.
My nightly walks turned into quiet explorations of the periphery of meaning, those uncertain spaces where identity falters and the lines between what I know and what I can no longer understand begin to blur.
I walked for hours, always at night, moving through everyday spaces transformed by solitude and darkness. Courtyards, empty streets, silent homes, fragments of landscape that felt like pieces of a distorted memory.
I photographed with a small flash, as if asking the place a question. Each image was an attempt to hold onto a trace, a clue, something that might restore a sense of meaning.
Even on film, the town appeared foreign, broken, obscure, fragile.
Nothing felt stable. Each frame was a fracture, a threshold.
Through this act of photographing, a form of resistance and listening, I began to confront questions that remain unresolved.
Who has really changed? Is it the place, or is it me?
And what remains, when the center is lost?