Sometimes I cannot smile

Sometime I cannot smile

An intimate, personal journey into the greenlandic juvenile world where nature, boredom, violence and a strong cultural legacy have been claiming for decades the highest and saddest “toll”. That of hundreds of young lives.

Greenland has the highest suicide rate among young people. Almost twenty percent of them attempt to end their lives every year. Two percent succeed.

It’s a far journey to Greenland. Up there our conception of life and death shakes, priorities are inverted, elements shuffled. A fatalist, dichotomous approach to life. Black or white, without shades in between, raw and cruel.

It’s about surviving, often psychological.

A delicate exploration of the subtle and intimate war many young people fight against violence, boredom and emptiness, a struggle that has always been the “raison d’etre” of young generations, the difference being that in east greenland many of them lose that battle.

Dark Summer Sun

DARK SUMMER SUN

Somewhere along th US under a dark summer sun

study #5

Meditations over time passing by | study #5

INDEX G

INDEX G

The Gini Index is a statistical measure of inequality, also used to measure residential segregation.

The optimism associated with recent declines in racial segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas may be dampened by new evidence of racial and ethnic geographic balkanization at other levels of geography (places & suburbs). A new macro-segregation, where the locus of racial differentiation resides increasingly at higher scales of geography (e.g. between central cities, suburban areas and fringe areas) rather than in neighborhood-to- neighborhood differences. In other words ethnoracial segregation has declined at some levels of geography (neighborhood-to-neighborhood) while increasing at other spatial scales (city-to-suburb or suburb-to-suburb).

In St Louis, for instance, ZIP codes matter. North of Delmar blvd, 95% black, life expectancy is 67. At a walking distance, few hundreds yards south of Delmar blvd, 70% white, a person has a life expectancy of 82.

As in a visual dialogue between R. Carver and E. Hopper this work unfolds as a “theater of silence” play, made of an absence of characters and their peculiar stories, where things seen and narrated remain untold and suspended in time, in that specific moment of uncertainty, poised between something elusive that just happened, and whose consequences we are just able to perceive, or the exciting feeling that it will happen soon. A limbo filled with tensions and doubts. Nothing happens apparently, but the story takes place in the silence of lives.

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Study 4

Meditations over time passing by | study #4

Study 3

Meditations over time passing by | study #3

Study 2

Meditations over time passing by | study #2

Study 1

Meditations over time passing by | study #1

WHERE DOES THE WHITE GO

WHERE DOES THE WHITE GO (2016)

The project, born from the desire to explore the relationship between images, memory and the transitory nature of human existence, is a photographic census of the inhabitants who “resist” in the emptying small villages of my mountains and, at the same time, a personal and silent crossing of the landscape, an homage to mountains, a meditation on the slow social and cultural mutation of the territory.

My tribute to the mountain is a tribute to (its) silence.

The absence of words, this is the nature of the relationship I have with the mountains. Long pauses, ancient and vital rhythms perceived in the oblivion, deep breaths, worlds that reveal themselves only through silence and that words would damage. An absence that leaves us untouched by sound-interference and the “white-noise” of human society; an absence that transforms our perspective and brings us back to our primordial perceptions. It’s words and chaos that make the silence necessary and so valuable.

The wind rages, low clouds, mist, snowstorms. A mountain, still by its nature, is then molded and shaped by these elements, charged with eternal and magnetic energies, which date back to the dawn of times.

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