Suburban base
This ongoing project is based on a visual exploration of my hometown Monza, the Brianza area, and the surrounding areas of Milan, in Northern Italy. The broad goal of this body of work is to unlock and reveal the artistic potential of this area. It isn't a problematic zone, and it's not a particularly fascinating one either; as many provincial areas, it's commonly perceived as a mediocre, mundane "nothingness" offering people little value beyond a place to work and a place to sleep. Everything is kind of tamed down, both on the positive spectrum and on the negative one. There's conflicts and issues, sure, but nothing like what happens in major cities - nothing really ever making it the front pages of newspapers, except seldom cases. And there's nice places and overall a general acceptable level of well-being, but nothing opulent enough to be worthy a reportage. And yet, if you look carefully enough, some small cracks appear - contradictions, isolation, unexpected beauty, fascinating situations.
Art, and photography in particular, is often used to emphasize the obvious and reiterate clichés, highlighting for instance the evident, commonly-accepted beauty of a place, a situation or a person (think of most "travel photography", for instance) - or on the other hand, to exploit poverty , disadvantage and "freaks" for the sake of some cheap attention. While these approaches may not be entirely wrong per se, I think that they need to be complemented with something different, something questioning them. So the idea I would like to convey with this project is that reality is more subjective and more based on representation that we think, and that we don't have to accept a certain common interpretation of reality as a given, immutable standard. Any place or situation, even the most boring and quiet provincial suburb, can be poignant and tell a story, if you just look at it with an unprejudiced eye. The interesting stuff is maybe less "in-your-face" than with other areas, but is there.
On a second, more personal level, this project also started as a personal exploration of "my" places, the places in which I was born and grew up, in a constant effort to see them with new or different eyes. I have a very close and affectionate relationship with my environment, so I find this exercise artistically inspiring, and somehow therapeutic as well. In fact, "me" approaching photography for the first time in my life in early 2019 - and quite out of the blue, actually - coincided with "me" coming back home after a few years living in another city. This was not clear for me since the beginning, but thinking about it and thinking about why I kept being drawn to "my places" as in a sort of closed maze which keeps you gravitating around the same center, I realised that I felt a need to build a new relationship with my hometown and accept the fact that I lost the one I had, instead of desperately trying to find it again. Or, in other words, to re-interpret it and give a new order and a new meaning to the places in order to do the same with my life itself. And photography turned out to be, maybe, the best companion for that.
For these reasons and this ongoing nature of this work, the images are arranged and presented in a purely chronological order basing on the moment when they were shot or edited.