HEROES
is a photographic project born in 2013 to tell the
difficult survival of artisan shops and small family-run businesses to the
change imposed by globalization. Only some of these places, which for
generations have handed down their craft, resist characterizing the uniqueness
of the urban landscape.
Cities are undergoing a continuous process of
gentrification, homologating and losing that element of identity that
distinguishes and makes each place unique. Old traditional neighborhoods that
represent the experience of entire generations of tenants are completely turned
upside down. Investors and companies in the construction sector redesign the
new geography of the city according to the needs of the emerging bourgeoisie,
requiring the construction of modern shops, elegant premises and expensive
lofts, luxury Hotels. The inhabitants, due to the increase in the cost of
living, are forced to move, while social relationships are
wiped out.Similarly, economic activities must adapt to the needs of new
inhabitants: in many cases they are forced to close due to the increase in the
price of rents and competition, as well as the progressive disappearance of
regular customers. From a sociological point of view, Saskia Sassen
demonstrates how inequalities are increasingly growing in the global city also
due to the absence of religious, ethnic or social communities and relations.
(The Global City)
I spent my childhood in Spoleto, Umbria, a town full of small shops and artisans who, until recently, were the
beating heart of the economy. I loved spending time in the cobbler's shop or in
the grocery store near my house where my grandmother sent me to do the
shopping, places where the hours seemed to expand. I grew up in these streets
where human relationships were the center of life. I soon realized that this
dimension was disappearing pushed by a mysterious force, a new era was coming.
The
emotional and poetic trace was condensed in the artistic research from which
the Heroes photographic project developed. During the pandemic, many of these
businesses were forced to final closure due to the lock-down, social distance,
the increase in online sales, severely undermining an already compromised
situation.
In my photographic research Memory and Time are fundamental
elements: the memory of repeated and handed down gestures, the time of waiting,
the attention to the habits and needs of loyal customers, the simple daily
conversations, the hand-packed paper package. Rituals that might seem banal and
obvious in our age. Places and subjects observed through the lens take the form
of a Wunderkammer in which spaces and human profiles still communicate a sense
of wonder, interstices of time in which every detail is full of meanings.
