Rayuela

These are the last things, she wrote. One by one they disappear and never come back. I can tell you of the ones I have seen, of the ones that are no more, but I doubt there will be time. It is all happening too fast now, and I cannot keep up.

( Paul Auster, In the Country of the Last Things )

Rayuela is the Spanish name for hopscotch and can be translated as "the game of the world”. To me, it represents a metaphore of the process of growth, a glance at my childhood fantasies, that now have become eerie visions of a world that I cannot recognize anymore.

We are ghosts and child monsters of all kinds ourselves.

Portraits and self-portraits go along in an uninterrupted flow with nature and animals, life and death. Being born and raised in the countryside of a small village in northern Italy, I remember those elements as part of my childhood’s fantasies, but as time passed by, and I grew up, it all fell into oblivion.

Since what shapes the nature of photography is time itself, photographs became my own memory.

Thus, my work lies in a concept of photography as a vital experience. The camera allows me to explore the relationships between man and nature, the individual and the cultural, the real and the psychological.

But it’s also a game I play, although a very serious game: photographs are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible of all things. Being aware of that, I tend to create disembodiment, to a certain point on purpose, because I’m suspicious of reality.

I’m obsessed by the vertigo that happens when we perceive the usual order is undermined.

A slight laceration in the texture of our visible world. It’s an aged world, with cracks and fissures, dust. There are parts thin as glass-plates, too eerie to walk upon. And finally, an ambiguity of the objects : life and death, dream and reality, face and mask blur.

What moves appears stiff, what is still seems possessed by an unsettling life.

This world has a plant and animal life clearly related to organic decay.

I’m interested in those zones where time takes over life, places that seem to invite birds to nest.

*Rayuela is a series of black and white fine art prints hand-colored.