MOTHER

MOTHER: Photography links, undoubtedly, what is deeply within us (which we cannot understand or describe) with everything that surrounds us. I began to photograph my mother, after finding and reading her diary, in which are reported, thoughts, moods, to establish a transversal dialogue. I use photography as a bridge, a connection that helps me learn to really know her, I learn to spend time with her, I learn to love my mother in different ways. It’s been a long time since I started and I’m still photographing her to testify and tell her path, her itinerary (as she calls it): "This spiritual and inner journey is beautiful, where I always discover new energies that fill moments of discouragement and fatigue, discouragement and disappointment"; but with this I also tell our relationship, our history, to have more and more a firm awareness and create a baggage of strong memories. I express and visualize this experience, transforming it into something illusory linear and diversified that is how we prefer to perceive changes over time. I’m not saying that photography can fill that gap of words never said between us, but it helps me and I spend more time with my mother, we talk, we discuss things, the photographer. I observe how her body changes, marked by the passage of time, by the pain, by the fatigue for a husband/father in a wheelchair. As she herself writes: "If I think of my age, I do not think of old age with anguish; I feel a feeling of tenderness, despite the wrinkles and the various frailties or weaknesses of the body". It’s not just portraits of my mother, in this job I represent the situations and moments of her life, she talks about her, but she could talk about any mother. In addition to my approach, there is also his, physical and metaphysical "I noticed this dialectic in life, which is not only a philosophical theory, but a reality. Faith helps to live, projected into a horizon beyond, while remaining anchored to the present". This, a reflection that my mother wrote in the diary, I think offers an important point of reference for this work: "The age that I am living, corresponds to autumn, in nature, which, contrary to what we think, is not the age of decay; autumn is a commonplace as decay, trees that lose their leaves; instead in autumn there is a rebirth, a new vitality, an energy that becomes meditation, quiet, tranquility". "I feel a feeling of gratitude for life and serenity; gratitude for the family I had, for the studies I was able to undertake in college, and I was passionate about philosophy; for the freedom of choice I exercised; for my present family."