You studied engineering before turn ing to photography – when did you first develop an interest in photo graphy? When I was at university my father gave me his camera and his darkroom equipment. It was a moment where I was not enjoying my studies, and I quickly got into photography. At first I always shot in the same place, an abandoned factory where there was amazing light. And I was shooting purely to have something to print in the darkroom. I made a series of prints from the factory and started showing them around. A few compliments about those photographs, along with my growing disaffection with engineering were all it took.
and how that settlement became a chance to preserve something of the wider area. Rome underwent a massive process of urban growth, and yet several green areas survived in the city centre and in the suburbs. The communities who settle down there often develop somewhat anarchistic and temporary ways of inhabiting a place. And in these exceptional conditions, for shorter or longer periods, a mutual protection is established between the people
Have Casilino 900, Angela’s Garden or Temporary Houses been pub lished in any Italian magazines and what was the local reaction to the situation? It’s hard to evaluate the average reaction of Italians to this issue. Over all these years we have been taught to reject foreigners as people who should leave because they take jobs, houses, even seats on the bus from us. It’s a kind of racism that stems from the way we have been governed in recent years. Now, without much uproar and with the government’s approval, the Roma people have been registered based on their race and religion. The fingerprints of adults and children were pre-emptively collected for se curity reasons.
foam magazine # 28 talent
‘I’m interested in the relationship between urban territory and the people who live there in an unconventional way.’
Casilino 900 is part of your on going Temporary Autonomous Zone project, a mapping of housing projects in and around Rome. What sparked off this personal project? I started this work four years ago. I was working on a project on the eastern suburban area of Rome and there I met some people who squatted an office building. I’ve been working on the housing and living conditions in Rome ever since. At first I focused on squatters transforming buildings not originally intended for habitation. Now I’m more interested in the relationship between urban territory and the people who live there in an unconventional way. After what happened with the camp in Rome at the beginning of 2010 it’s quite refreshing to see your images. The outside world has prob ably been persuaded that Romans, or at least Berlusconi, are fairly im patient with the gypsy community. What impact were you hoping these pictures would have? My idea was to go beyond the stereo typical image of Casilino 900, which is seen as a difficult or even criminal place and a symbol of the segregation of the Roma community. I wanted to show how they found their own way of living there,
interview by Anne-Celine Jaeger
and the territory. When the Casilino 900 camp was cleared out, the land on which the camp had existed for half a century was made ready to be turned into another of the many suburbs of Rome. Can you tell me a little bit about Angela’s Garden? The colours are in teresting and muted, like a garden of Eden gone wrong. That is exactly the story of that place. It was meant to be a small nature reserve. You can find a wide variety of birds and foxes living around the swamp. A small initiative to protect the place eventually failed, and today the area is a shelter not only for the animals but for homeless people who managed to build a safe place for themselves among the trees of the swamp. Most of them are immigrants from Eastern Europe. The case of Angela and her family is different. They were just about the first to go and live there. Piero, her father, is Italian and says that if he had the money he would buy that land and live there forever. Angela grew up sleeping under a bridge, playing around the swamp, always under a roof of leaves or cement, hiding in the semidarkness. The overall visual effect is meant to show the dim light Angela is used to.
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What makes an image worth shooting or capturing? The preliminary stage is merely emotional, a fragment of reality standing out and becoming something worth being photographed. It’s an instinctive process that evolves and becomes refined with experience, but that eludes any rational analysis at the moment it occurs. The next stage is about elaborating a vision, the choice of a certain distance from things to represent what you previsualized of a particular scene. How do you come up with new project ideas? Most of my projects are made in the city where I live, even quite near my house, so they usually begin with seeing things while driving around, or walking. What was the single most inspiring thing you witnessed last year? On 14 December tens of thousands of people marched in Rome to protest against Berlusconi. That day he snatched a confidence vote by pretty much buying votes from the opposition. I think that moment gave me the hope that the Berlusconi era would soon come to an end. That gives you the strength to keep living and working in Italy. •