COLLATERAL IMAGES
Philadelphia, New York City.
2010-2016
Medium Format Color Film
Mohammed and his mother Jinan struggle daily as they step outside the tiny room they share in a family-run shelter on the outskirts of Philadelphia. When asked if they would like to return to Iraq, they quickly retort “It’s impossible.” The mother and the son sought refuge from the hate and war that tore their family apart and robbed Mohammed of his right leg, which was ruined by a car bomb in 2006 when he was just 12 years old. Jinan says she brought Mohammed to America to give him a future “with something more than a job at the Falluja police station,” like his father.
She wants him to get an education and both relish the freedom to do and think as they please. After a year living in temporary housing shelters, the two obtained political asylum in 2010, and have taken the first small steps toward their American dream. In this set of photos, as Mohammed turns 17 and ever closer to manhood, a sense of excitement and frustration pervades the small room they call home, and shapes the relationship between mother and son.
ENTER PARADISE
USA
2015
Medium Format Color Film
The United States is utopia embodied. You should not judge their crisis in the same way as we judge ours – the crisis of the old European countries. We have a crisis of historical ideals caused by the impossibility of realising them. They have a crisis of a realized utopia as a consequence of its duration and continuity.
― Jean Baudrillard, America
I perceive the American landscape as a mosaic of manufactured memories: places I had never been before, that I recognised, through the lens, as surprisingly familiar. They show themselves to me in the shapes of buildings, in the veins of a rock, or in the color of a wall. I can’t figure out if those memories are from a past Iʼve never lived, a present gliding slowly past, or even, perhaps, an upcoming future. It seems like my memories are generating the landscapes in these photographs, leaving me with the doubt if I actually went through America, or if it was just a dream.
Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
ALBERI
Firenze
2020
Medium Format B&W Film
In 2020 time was passing slower than usual, nearly frozen, no one was around, I felt stuck. It developed in a sort of hallucination, where a variety of characters, themselves stuck, showed up in the trunks, forming a forest of emotions.
“L’attesa” di Luigi Pirandello
Io sono come l’albero che aspetta
la sua stagione e morto intanto pare.
Vien qualche vispa cincia a dimandare:
«Albero, ancora? Bada, è tempo: getta!»
Ma alle cince non dà l’albero retta:
muto ed assorto, rimane a sognare.
Sogna i freschi rampolli, e che tra i rami
verrà per grazia a raccogliere il volo,
ospite prezioso, un rosignuolo.
Piú d’altri uccelli non s’udran richiami.
In ciel, la luna; e magici ricami
d’ombra le frondi stamperan sul suolo.
Sogna e sogna… Ma già forse è passata
la sua stagione, e ad aspettarla sta
l’albero, invano, o forse non verra’
per lui giammai… Se questa, albero,
è stata l’ultima nostra gelida vernata,
che bei sogni la scure abbatterà!