Suburban base
This ongoing project is based on a visual exploration of my local suburbs (Monza/Milan, Northern Italy), with the main goal of isolating and highlighting the feelings of composure, isolation, suspension and at the same time, unexpected beauty, dignity and serendipity that these types of areas can evoke.
Urbanism governs the culture, the habits, the relationships and the conflicts between people living in a city area, and yet it responds primarily to political and financial stakeholders. Most cities of the Western society are organised with a very functional approach, as they must maximise value and cut costs, and the human need for entertainment and distraction gets channeled into an array of specific areas and services, like malls, amusement parks, public centers, or turistic destinations. This tight separation of spaces and purposes, I believe, has a very powerful negative impact on many people’s imagination and perception, leading them to “switch on” their eye and sensitivity only in dedicated areas where they have been, so to speak, “trained” to switch them on, often neglecting the other hints of beauty or wonder (or calm, joy, introspection or whatever other feeling) that they may encounter in their daily routine.
To this extent, art itself 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 or blatant "ugliness" for the sake of it. I don't think that's necessarily wrong, but I think it needs to be complemented with something different, something questioning and challenging it - at least in order to avoid ending up with a sterile, other-directed taste. 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.
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.
(click to enlarge)