Breathing dreams / All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream…

“… A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about ...” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby “… All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream …” Edgar Allan Poe, A Dream within a Dream "Have I ever really dreamed? Did I ever really look, wanted this?" Some statues are not statues. They're people stuck in time. They seem to look at you, think and want to talk to you. Usually I photograph them for what they should be: cultural goods to be documented. But sometimes not. With some of them, “a relationship is established" that goes further and starts a dialogue. "Have you ever really dreamed? Have you ever really looked, wanted this? What do I see is what you were?" You start asking questions that they somehow answer. It is thanks to this imaginary conversation, this exchange of silent emotions, that the way I look at them through the camera changes. The resulting image is different from the usual and enriches a project of which “Breathing dreams” is one of the chapters: "My days have been a dream". A project that sees me in search, within the material, of what is left of the thoughts and emotions likely felt by those who posed for that statue. The marble athletes of the Foro Italico are an impressive overview of the sports and their ideal protagonists. In their neoclassical features, the thought of those who wanted them is legible. In the gestures and poses, muscular, powerful, of these sculptures hides the idea of a supremacy that, in the desires of those who wanted to surround the then Foro Mussolini of these representations of athletes, all Italy should have had. "Fascist Italy must strive for primacy over land, sea, skies, matter and spirits." Sport was no exception: even through it one could and should explain the pre-eminence of an idea, the crazy dream of greatness of a man and of those who supported him. But within that "great dream", shattered in the tragedy of a country, there was necessarily a constellation of "little" dreams that challenged and won time and that remained there, intact. And what were the true dreams of those who lent their bodies to a concept not necessarily shared? Did those people really dream of glory? Were theirs also dreams of superiority or rather of a simple gesture, tended to unite rather than elevate? And what were instead those of the sculptors who enclosed them in stone, delivering those thoughts to eternity? That's what I asked myself when I looked at the statues surrounding the Marbles Stadium. This is what I wonder when I look "in the eyes" a person stuck in time and turned into sculpture. "Who are you? What's part of you in here? What were you thinking, what were you dreaming about? " I look for the answers through a different photograph from the one I usually use for work, where I add my emotions to those of those who once dreamed and lived trying to give them a voice again. “Breathing dreams” wants to look for those dreams within a dream hidden in those perfect bodies; represent those dreams of any men called to personify something greater than all of them. Individual and beautiful dreams, enclosed in stone athletes.