Se potessi essere Farfalla

Se potessi essere farfalla (If I could be Butterfly) is a research about familiar belonging, born from the intention of filling a void caused by an undesired physical and emotional distance.

Growing up while having a family split between two countries, Italy and Hungary, so culturally different, has caused me great confusion regarding my familiar and cultural identity and expectations of what I thought I knew about them. So I began to observe the spaces we share from afar and started to take a look into their daily lives to find answers.

Once a year, since I was born, I spend a week visiting my family in Újpest, Hungary. Like the stereotype of the butterfly's life, according to which it spends only one week in its new body, I spend yearly just one week in my second identity, observing the places and people to whom I feel most connected, yet which I experience with great detachment. I tried to fit into it.

They are my mother's family.

I started photographing them a long time ago, without really caring why. After a few years, I began to ask myself the same questions over and over again:

Who are they the rest of the year? And what do they know about me? Where do I come from? Who are these strangers? Am I the stranger? Who am I to myself?

Questions I still ask myself, especially now that I'm an adult, and inevitably changes happen very fast and I can't freeze and live in the past.

In recent years, I've begun analyzing all the photographic material I've produced over sixteen years, and I've realized that despite the persistent gap between me and them, my need to find definitive answers can never be satisfied.

Thanks to photography, I've learned to temporarily fill this "space" of which I sometimes feel integral, but more often out of place. Photography is my love language for them.