Congratulations on your Special Mention! How does it feel to have your work recognised by tastemakers like Alastair McKimm and Emma Bowkett?
It was a real honor for me to be judged by these great tastemakers. I take pictures for my own need, because I deeply love life, losing myself in it, observing it and telling it. I am already satisfied by the idea of doing something that makes me happy and that allows me to connect in such a strong and authentic way with myself and with the world. Photo contexts should also have the aim of comparing you directly with experts and professionals in the sector, making you realize that what you tell and above all how you tell it, has its value even outside of you. When this value is recognized in this way, it is truly exciting.
What is the story behind your entry?
I have been telling stories about Palermo for several years. It is the city that allowed me to start taking pictures. I feel deeply connected to Palermo and I love finding the stories hidden in its streets. With this story I wanted to focus on an aspect that I have always felt and experienced firsthand in Palermo: the deep bond that you can feel between this city and women. The image that was awarded by the judges of Palm Studios is in fact part of a story about a group of little girls growing up in Danisinni, a complex neighborhood of Palermo, Sicily. It is a story about freedom, about the rebirth of a place, about Palermo, and its feminine power. Danisinni, a neighborhood of Arab origin, stands on a natural depression, as it was once the bed of Papireto, one of the rivers that ran through Palermo. Mainly because of the morphology of the land, Danisinni over time has remained isolated from the rest of the city, almost suspended between the green of its fields and Palermo historic center. Its isolation is anomalous given that the neighborhood is within walking distance of the cathedral and the city historic center. It is a place that has long been trying to revive and regain its strong identity. Various forces have in recent years chosen to plant seeds here, starting with Brother Mauro (a Capuchin friar), working hard daily, focusing on the neighborhood’s resources, beauty, children and youth, and art declined in all its forms.
Women are often the focus of your images – why is it important to you to centre women at the heart of your work?
Above all, I wanted to talk about these girls who resist, who grow like wildflowers, who spread their light, who fill the neighborhood with their voices, who draw their ancestral strength from some unknown energy that Palermo hides within itself. And you can read that strength in their looks, in their gestures, in the aura that surrounds them. I wanted to tell the days that pass, never the same but always in the same streets, the complicity, their codes and purity, the disruptive, light-filled emotions that remind us that life, in its essence, is nothing but this.
I think I have always been drawn, even unconsciously, to approach the female universe, because I live it, I know it, because my story is that of a woman, like the ones I tell. I have been telling the story of all the women in my family in Sicily for about 14 years (from the youngest to the oldest) and so, if I think about it, I started right from the walls of my home. The story is called “Females, a Sicilian story”. And while I began to tell the Sicilian interiors of my house and “my women”, at the same time I began to explore the streets of Palermo and Southern Italy.
In a completely natural way, I was captivated by the stories of women, by their looks, by their contradictions, by their ability to resist, overturn, revolutionize, protect, mend. Women, especially here in the South, have something mysterious that surrounds them, they carry with them primordial secrets. They know how to live, they know how to survive, and they know how to be reborn. They have a strength that cannot be explained, it is there for some reason, and they are its bearers. I am attracted by this vital energy that, like an invisible cloak, covers everything. I imagine Palermo as a woman with big dark eyes, with her hair tied up badly, who angrily yells at someone for some reason and then immediately turns around looking at you and smiling endlessly.
What drives you to take photos?
My photography is driven by a deep need for knowledge, by an unbridled curiosity about life. I love to observe it in silence. The anthropological aspect is inherent in my constant photographic research. Taking pictures is a deep need of mine, it calms me down or moves me brutally, it excites me or moves me deeply. Photography lets me “get closer”, it lets me understand the world and at the same time myself, without reservations, without judgments, with deep respect and love.I am interested in pure street scenes full of essence, portraits extrapolated from life as it flows, as well as the most intimate and long-term stories where I enter on tiptoe. I am interested in human relationships. I am fascinated by cracks, imperfections. I believe that the most intense light enters from there. I am interested in humanity, contradictions, beauty where it seems there is none, the poetry inherent in life itself, in the striking moments as in those in which nothing happens.The streets dazzled by the sun, the warm interiors, the endless cigarettes slowly consumed, the Madonnas that come from the sea, the surreal scenes, the indecipherable and bewitching women, the chaos, the suspension of the suburbs. I am interested in the South that unfolds the authentic, fascinating, mystical life, sometimes broken, other times healed, but always sincere.
How has your Sicilian heritage influenced your photography?
My photography is inextricably linked to Sicily and my being Sicilian. I would like the vibrations of the South and my Sicily to be perceived in every image. The atmospheres of the Mediterranean are part of my heritage, my imagination, my vision. Sicilian reality is imbued with contradictions, passion, suspension, energy. Since I started taking photographs, I have tried to do it freely and without superstructures, trying to find my point of view and my language, pursuing it, letting myself be carried away by my instinct, by my pure and personal vision. But more than anything else, in every image I try to convey the strength that I perceive in my land, that passes through me and that I try to return in the fragments of life that I collect.
