Una volta qualcuno mi disse

The project explores the boundary between fantasy and reality at the origins of fairy tales and popular beliefs. During a trip to Calabria, I collected memoirs in which blood is identified as a powerful element. Its role as a practical indicator of life, history and absolute bonds makes it capable of exerting influence on free will, seasonal fertility cycles and reasons of life and death. What is today tied to childhood has, in fact, ancient roots, determined by observation and communion with nature that contemporary and scientific development has made superfluous. Recognizing power in natural elements such as water and blood in the peasant culture of southern Italy was a pragmatic action taken by these people to understand what surrounded them. Magic and those who exercised it, spells, potions and miracles are based on the ability to distinguish natural dynamics, vital and organic flows and to arrange them into a hierarchy.

The project starts as a personal search for the incredible, the irrational that determines fascination for the ancestral. It is not about the need to believe again, but rather about remembering why what was believed was believed, what dynamics led to the development of popular beliefs and where their origins lie. This undervalued historical parallel has left children with a lesson for adults. Living in a world full of answers flattens the possibility of vision and imagination. Searching for the fairy tale and the magical power in my daily life is a show of respect for the stories and cultures that are disappearing in this territory, erased by the race for modernization, during which the need for reality and concreteness risks both the loss of imagination, and the loss of the relational dynamics defined by direct involvement with one's surroundings.