Sēcrētus

Sēcrētus is my return to the unwritten roots of my home in Puglia. I photograph its silent healers, rejecting postcard stereotypes to document their quiet power. I use my camera to reclaim an ancient, sacred feminine kept alive in the shadows.

Born and raised in Puglia, I breathed the invisible within the walls of my home. Since childhood, I felt a profound pull toward the spiritual dimension, an obsession cultivated in my grandmother’s bathroom, where I locked myself away for hours making what I called potions. I mixed wild leaves, crushed petals, and forgotten medicine bottles, producing murky liquids with the intense, bitter scent of trampled plants. This instinct to look beyond the surface is tied to a vivid childhood memory: small and ill, my mother brought me to a dark house that smelled of the ancient past. I remember lying on the lap of an elderly woman wearing a floral apron. Saying almost nothing, she placed her bare hand directly on my stomach, closed her eyes, and began to whisper. There was immense power in that silence, an absolute mystery that overwhelmed me.

For a long time, I forgot that dimension. Relocating to Amsterdam, I spent years producing clean, reassuring, and polished photography. But in 2021, during a workshop, I suddenly felt naked and inadequate. I realized that pristine aesthetic was hollow and did not belong to me. The distance from my homeland had become an immense weight, and I felt a deep, physical need to reconnect with the subterranean spirituality that is mine by birth.

Returning South, I knew immediately I had to move away from any stereotypical or postcard representation of my land. Sēcrētus is born from the refusal to view these practices as folkloric relics to be objectified, or as mere superstitions born of ignorance. I am driven by the urgency to reclaim the dignity and autonomy of this system of thought.

The women I encountered, often misunderstood, feared, or marginalized as masciare, are not folkloric figures, but the silent guardians of an ancient sacred feminine. They carry a virtus, a power historically stripped from women and supplanted by official devotion, which has survived in the shadows, recorded in the cellular memory of our land. It is unwritten knowledge, passed from hand to hand through matriarchal lines, demanding a profound empathetic bond. To document it, I had to excavate my own family's history, breaking through the wall of "things left unsaid" before the doors were opened to me.

Sēcrētus, from the dialect "u sacrt" (the secret gift), combines photography, video, and testimonies to build a tangible trace of this knowledge. I do not use the camera to coldly record a rite, but as a bridge to the invisible, an act of resistance to restore to my South its legitimate philosophy. For the first time in my life, I am not just photographing a subject. I am telling my own story through theirs.

Find out more about Sēcrētus here: https://www.kellyrosa.me/stories/secretus