High fire in the forest's heart

"The west does not need us, nor does Russia because she no longer exists. You have to retreat into the loneliness of a stoic cosmopolitanism, i.e., start to live and breathe in a vacuum.” "Now I can't see anything in front of me… I can say I see the dark forest… But it's not that exactly. If I say I see the desert - it isn't desert either… It is not a gorge or an abyss; it's just some kind of hole. It is a dark blackness behind which I know that there is nothing good.” These are the two citations that are a hundred years distant. The first was emitted by Semyon Frank, one of the philosophers who found themselves "between worlds", arriving in Germany in 1922 on a so-called "Philosophers steamer", a ship that carried away writers, lawyers, historians, and philosophers away from their homeland handpicked by Lenin for deportation. The second citation is emitted by an inhabitant of today's Russia. People who left the Russian Empire as a consequence of the 1917 October Revolution are estimated to be almost two million. By September 2022, a minimum of 800 thousand people have left Russia. Following my research on migration, I turn in this project to a distant but current phenomenon in search of the descendants of “white emigrants” - not only members of Russian aristocratic families as it is commonly presented, but intellectuals of various professions, artists and the military, who opposed the Bolsheviks and, following the October Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War (1917-1923), had to flee the country. I developed this project in Italy over the last three years, working with archival documents, places and memories, trying to reconstruct memories and find metaphors for their representation. All the peoplerepresented are the descendants of the fled families. The story of migration is as old as time and as contemporary as the present moment. Seeing through past events helps us to overcome the space that separates us from them, to understand historical recurrences and the consequences of choices that directly impact the lives of people and the world.