The name we hold

The name we hold is an intimate story that talks about possession and existence, fragile and proud. A different path to understand our relationships and the encounters with new worlds.

Last year me and my family decided to left the city where we lived together to move to another one.

Like all the important decisions it was a difficult choice.

This decision brought me to review all the things I wanted to bring with me.

This aspect that essentially concerned the detachment from a series of objects that we have kept led to ask a question to myself:

What’s my idea of Home?

So I start researching some themes and keywords that could direct me towards a right way to face this question: memory, that often don't lie only in the people but also in the houses they lived it, the oneiric and surrealistic aspect, a really important part of this project and above all the concept of border, limit, the consideration of perimeter that is basically the fundamental part of this work.

Moving from another city become a pretext to trigger a desire to tell my concept of home, which often does not refer to only the domestic four walls but concern a messy wider universe full of objects, roads and routes, presence and also routines and habits related to places and things that belongs to us that lead me back to the concept of safe place.

This work was born to twist my idea of safe place to give more importance to our presence.

The most important thing I learned making this work is the capability of photography to make visible the imagination. Even our fears.

My case was the fear of new, starting from zero trying to bring with me something more than several emotions that I can't decipher.

This kind of fear arise in the common aspect of human life, for that it was easy for me to link this state to another element: the uncanny.

The disturbing element can be identified as a frightening feeling that goes back to what is common to us, so we can identify a similarity between disturbing and familiar.

Something we know for sure but at same time secret.

I used that to force my fear and put this duality in my images, trying to understand my feelings.

Because if I think about the fear of changing I also have to consider the beauty of new, the possibility to open to new world, test me always not forgetting the things I hold.

So I start shooting, making the sequence as if I wanted to rebuild my house, from the basement, and slowly increase the narration introducing something that represent the house and my family, to arrive to a total reconstruction but not in a temporal line, instead following a rhythm dictated by sensations of time.

When you feel that something is closer to you, or not, depending on the moment.

Starting from the concept of perimeter, as a measuring language, I wanted to put into question my presence.

Home become a shared content that push me outside of my shell, creating always new familiar space and redefine my certainties.

All this love I would never realized that it would rhyme with something unsaid, something strangely misunderstood. Until I would have understood the reason for loving it, that deep down is the same as leaving it.

The name we hold take the shape of an amulet that help me to overcome difficulties and carry the weight of my decisions.