Male, white, born in the eighties from a middle class family in a G7 country.
I do art.
Moreover, I am a stranger. I don’t live any more in the country where I grew up, I fled it because I felt like a stranger there, I wasn’t home. So I had to assume to be a stranger, at least in the new country my oddness was understood. I had an excuse, that kind of excuse that autochthonous give you because of their largesse, because you are shy, because you are tamed.
At the beginning it was clear: my dictionary was poor, my accent strong. After some time I got confident speaking, that’s when troubles start again. Either people not dare to ask, either they are amazed by this foreigner that learnt their precious and difficult language that well. It pisses me off.
What is the first adjective people apply to you? Is it a matter of height, weight, colour of the hair, colour of the eye? Is it the colour of your skin? Is the country you come from? Is it funny, sexy, smiling?
Most part of the people that tells you that you are free are funny, sexy, smiling. They can be. I could as well because I am part of the most privileged population of the world.
Still, I am a stranger.
If you are not a stranger it is quite hard to understand how does it feel like. I am not talking about tourism, be a tourist is a completely different situation. It is temporary and deliberate. Being a stranger is permanent. A stranger is a displaced person, it can be an enigma, it is an incognito. Same people see strangers as a threat.
I am proud of being a threat. I don’t like safeness, I don’t like comfort. This is not about risk and heroism, this is not about having a wild and adventurous life. This is about not feeling home anywhere, this is about permanent instability.
It is about difference.
It is about a situation that allows you to accept loss. It is a situation when you accept the fact that there are many things that you wont be able to understand, and many others that you wont be able to control.
This is about complexity.
To bother is why I do art. To expose oddness is why I do art. To recall diversity is why I do art. Sometimes it takes me to care about beauty, sometimes it takes me to exhibit sorrow.

Everything has to disappear – typical French expression for cleareance sales

Since a couple of years, I systematically document the restoration campaigns of the European architectural heritage.
It wasn’t necessary to record the palaces’ clean and pristine facades, rather I wanted to fix the scaffoldings to keep a trace of this technological architectures – sometimes minimal, sometimes spectacular – that are put in place in order to let the ancient survive.
The protocol is always the same: every picture is taken with a view camera in black and white film before the sun rises.
In an almost obtuse way, I apply an obsolete method and an old-fashioned language to a subject which is at the same time current and anachronistic.

60x80cm framed black and white prints

The secret of art must, whenever possible, be unveiled
Marcel Broodthaers

It is an assessment. The observation of unexpected presences that undermine decors, that pop up on the marked route.
It's about being fascinated by this machinery working discreetly.
Senso della visita attempts to draw links, to underline the complexity of restoration, display and conservation policies. These domains often graze paradoxes, they face doubts and vacillate on difficult choices. They get layered and build history themselves; they linger between divulgation and deontology.
Showing a work about these issues has to take account of the conventions of the exhibition space. Senso della visita is made of two series of photographs, some motion pictures, pictograms and a brochure. Two pieces from the Jérôme de Vienne collection complete this inventory of elements that could be present or presented in a museum. Through this articulation, I provoke the encounter between different objects and ideas belonging to the same world – moreover I reverse their functions.

Framed photographs, loop videos on tablet, A4 booklet, transparent wallpaper, ready-mades. Variable dimensions.

Niort is the fourth financial centre of France: mutual funds, insurance companies, banks and related activities employ about ten thousand people in the department.
My research focused on the image that these companies create themselves: photographic collections, historiographical works and advertising archives are consistent with head offices, emblems located on the territory.
From these elements, I put together an unstable, composite representation of this universe.

Project realised during the Encounters of Young International Photography organised by CACP Villa Pérochon, France.

Photographs under glass, booklets on stands. Variable dimensions.

This book is a reenactment of a Mémento de nomenclature géographique published by the Republic of France in 1961.
Fifty-five years lates my only intervention is to invite the readers to tear a sheet apart and send this newy independent page to the Centre for artists’ books where they are gathered and shown.
In 2016 I published fifty-five copies, each following year I will issue one more copy.

The ruins of Palmyra are an obsession for westerners. Since the eighteenth century they go there and bring back images. At beginning they were drawings, architectural plans, nowadays the technical images used to assess the archaeological site are satellite images.
Besides the images, there is plenty of travel tales, expeditions accounts, novels.
By superposing images and documents, From horizon to nadir tries to put into perspective these representations keeping in mind the recent destructions occurred on the site. Collapsing old horizontal views and contemporary vertical images: it’s a free fall.

32 plates, looping video. Variable dimensions.

The nine protagonists of this book are objects hosted in Wrocław. They share one thing: around Second World War they have been moved. Or stolen, forged, broken, appropriated, exploited, uprooted.
Their stories tell the History of Silesian people as well, their peregrinations, their difficulties, their shared past.
I visited every place where these stories happened, in Poland or in Ukraine or Italy. I photographed, I collected documents and testimonies: layers overlap, History gets complicated, versions contradict each other.
Immigrated pieces tells these stories in a dialogue between myself and the young city of Wrocław surrounded by her centuries-old memories.

Paperback, 310 colour pages.

Shake hands is about stock photos, the legal issues connected to them and its imaginary.

Stock photos provide a typology of images the more and more standardised. Their cheap prices and the wide possibilities of its use make them popular and widespread.
Every image is alike, they stack themselves, they get layered. Their production is industrial.

This phenomenon is under control of a complex legal system of contracts which is seldom ignored.
Shake hands tries to underline the importance of these texts written in a technical language and shown with a cryptic page layout.

In this book, the contracts are illustrated by images found in stock photos websites. This association undermines the industrial characteristics of stock photos questioning the specific and unique photographic image.

Incidentally, Shake hands rises questions about gender, ethnic and social representations that are embedded in some of this vernacular photography.

Photographs are meant to be unique: can they resist to this industrial production, to the evenness of meaning, to this overwhelming flow of images?

Shake hands
self-published
72 pages, A5
unlimited edition
2014

We were in salento, yet we didn't see the sea - collaboration with Silvia Cesari

Grecìa salentina, south of Italy. Some abandoned and fascinating buildings appear in this images. The documentary style is polluted by a silent presence: a figure wearing an orange dress. She's hiding, she adheres to the walls, she's uncomfortable, unexpected. Her presence re-activates these neglected places.

Collaboration with Silvia Cesari
In-Cul.Tu.Re. project.

Artist's book, 24 pages, 70x35 cm, offset, 1500 copies.

8 C-prints laminated on corrugated plastic, 300x200 cm.

Carta bianca is an interactive publishing installation.
People has the possibility to edit a unique booklet starting from a large selection of images spread out on a table.
Carta bianca needs the activation of the public to exist. It questions the author figure and the photographic language at the same time.
Reproductions of some books left by visitors during the Berlin event at EXP12 follow as documentation of the installation.
>
>
>
Installation specifications:
8x4cm stickers, blank booklets, scissors, markers.
2011-2014.