Ov'era

Ov’era explores a territory shaped by human intervention. Developed around Malpensa Airport and the quiet resistance of Salvatore, the project reflects on loss, memory, and what persists as traces and silent presences between disappearance and permanence.

Ov’era is a project born from the observation of a territory deeply connected to me, the place where I was born and raised. A landscape shaped by human intervention and by a slow, irreversible transformation, it reflects on what disappears and on what, despite everything, continues to exist. What seems lost resurfaces as traces, absences, and silent presences, forming a fragmented narrative embedded in the land.

The project unfolds around Malpensa Airport, whose expansion is erasing significant portions of natural landscape and everyday life. This material loss intertwines with deep emotional wounds, connected to belonging and to the continuity between humans, territory, and memory.

Within this context, the story is not told through a single voice. Alongside my own experience emerges the presence of Salvatore, seventy-seven years old, who lives just a few hundred meters from an airport runway, in what has been defined as a “non-living zone.” Surrounded by constant noise and artificial light that erases the night, Salvatore remains. His daily gestures become a quiet voice, suggesting another way of inhabiting and existing within the landscape.

The images do not attempt to reveal everything, but to welcome what escapes visibility: human and non-human presences, memories, repetitive gestures, and traces of what once was. In this fragile space between the visible and the invisible, between disappearance and permanence, the landscape turns into a living archive populated by voiceless entities.

Ov’era explores the subtle interval between what disappears and what endures. Photography becomes a threshold capable of evoking absent presences, inviting us to imagine other ways of existing and to listen to what everyday life tends to conceal.