It Feels Like I've Been Here Before

Between 2019 and 2020, Benedetta Ristori traveled across the United States, exploring Nevada, Arizona, and California. She covered 1,180 miles through a landscape at once unknown and deeply familiar, slipping into her vision like a film she had already seen. Like a photograph or a kindred book, like a dream already dreamed. It Feels Like I've Been Here Before is a narrative that unfolds beyond specific places and names, arriving freely in a world that exists as an idea. The landscapes captured are less physical terrains and more psychological and cultural constructs—what Marc Augé might describe as "non-places," spaces defined by transience, disconnection, and abstraction. Gas stations, motels, and desolate highways bear traces of lives that never fully materialize in the frame, evoking a sense of absence and estrangement that mirrors the myths of the American Dream. These images are imbued with an uncanny familiarity, drawing on the collective visual memory propagated by cinema, literature, and popular culture. Like the scattered settlements and transient spaces that populate the photographs, the province exists as a landscape of paradox—a place of permanence and impermanence, nostalgia and displacement. The traces of progress and the wistful allure of decline are not merely reflections of a distant past but fundamental aspects of a world in continuous change.