HerstoriesA photo & words series, 2017-2018 (30x39 cm)
Herstories combines my photos with short stories about women I've met. They can be personal or alter-biographical, and come either in Italian or in English. (I add some captions as examples.) Every story has been creatively translated in a book published with la centrale edizioni. There have been exhibitions, too: 1 Stile B&B Gallery, Mantua (IT), 2018; Walk-in Studio festival, Milano (IT), 2019; Galleria del Premio Suzzara, Suzzara (IT) 2019; Window Gallery, Auckland (NZ), 2019; Hyperflexion Contemporary Art, Port Elizabeth (ZA), 2019 
You were walking one evening, mid-August, a time when the few people around become more friendly. A woman asked Would you please take a full-length picture of me?
You took several. She invited you to drink something in a café, told you her life. Substances, she said, I was in a rehabilitation center, I was so fine when I came out, they found me a job…
You listened thinking about the metaphors, the euphemisms people choose when it comes to drugs.
User, an American friend said about his boy.
My son is a user. (And with both words, substances and user, you had to think a moment before getting their meaning.)
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Herstories, installation at Galleria del Premio Suzzara, Suzzara (IT) ph. Alberto Laurenzi
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The police superintendent’s beautiful wife spent whole afternoons getting a tan in front of her open window. There were no balconies on the fourth floor. In the flat nearby lived a nervous dobermann, I remember it better than its family.
There was already a sort of gentrification: up to a year before, on the first floor a fat slow woman sporting purplish hair organized a small-scale brothel, peroxide blondes wearing fishnet stockings and lots of make-up, and was always afraid for her little bastard bitch to get pregnant, Take care! It can happen in a moment!
With time, we all moved elsewhere: from attic to ground floor everybody’s new.
The owner of the café on the corner and his sons are still there. We meet by chance, sometimes, at health check-ups and supermarkets.
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You were far away from home and quite lost, asked for directions. You felt very lucky when those three gave you a lift, promising they were going to drive you there. Their car went under the driving rain, nobody speaking, stopping at a deserted quarry.
You were saved by your innocence, your small voice when you said Where are we going? Then they knew they had misunderstood and brought you back to the small town they had just left, to the only hotel open in the dead season.
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