For many years I have tried to narrate a valley where I was born and where I’ve spent a lot of time since when I was a child even if I grow up in a big city like Milano. This valley is a place that I loved and hated, a place I’m tied to by an emotional link that involves me, my father passed away when I was fifteen and my mother disappeared one year ago.
![](https://www.prospektphoto.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Valparaiso-10-731x1024.jpg)
One day I started building an object with branches and pieces of wood found in a clearing. It hurt me to look at those unused branches, motionless, without any chance of joining. I painted them white in such a way that, once separated from time and negligence, it was evident that those had been part of something unique and unrepeatable.
At a certain point I decided to put aside any kind of documentary approach with the awareness that I have never been interested in the beauty of natural scenery or in the objective reality of this place. I was interested in giving a voice to a place that changes, protects and destroys people, through its existence in our lives.
![](https://www.prospektphoto.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Valparaiso-14-731x1024.jpg)
When you grow up in a city, you begin to think that the streets have no end. Here I expect the road to end after each hairpin bend, after every tunnel. Sometimes You leave the car and proceed by foot. After the initial enthusiasm the forest becomes intricate, the landmarks are lost and then you start looking down towards the valley, trying to catch sight of the road before night falls.My eyes linger on the cars left in the layby where the road ends, covering themselves with dust after their owners in the woods have lost any hope.
In my work, memories of the time spent in this valley are mixed with dreams, nightmares and visions that my mind has set in this familiar and at the same time distant place, drawing on a sort of magical realism.
![](https://www.prospektphoto.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Valparaiso-19-731x1024.jpg)
Before I was ten, I often dreamed of a landslide that, after wiping out the mountain side, struck our house. It was summer, my family andI were sleeping, we were sleeping in that house. At that time I did not like to spend the holidays in this valley and I woke up almost relieved. A few years later in a nearby village, a huge boulder broke off from a ridge and dropped on a parked car. They could hardly see colored strips of the car body popping out under the monolith. The engine was hot. It took several hours to find out if there was someone inside the car.
In a time where people look at photographs faster and faster, I decided to use a photographic language that would induce the observer to linger, to move closer and to squint in order to get used to the darkness of these iridescent images that conceal a personal journey towards the reckoning with this valley.