Recovery

Recovery is a series of journeys, selections and investigations started in 2012. When my family moved from Yugoslavia to Italy in 1991, our tenuous connection to the country where we were born became brittle, and finally broken: a mercurial period of suffering, which no one was capable of explaining to me. This work gave me an opportunity to heal this rift. From 2012 until today I have traveled to the Balkans 9 times, passing from Slovenia to Kosovo, through Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Macedonia and in the end, Albania. I analyzed live music scenarios and contexts, underground realities. Through cropping and digital magnification I uncovered an obsession with the faces of that territory. Their features and physiognomy became icons of a reality that belongs to my past, but absolutely shapes my present. Faces that embody the widespread attitude of cynical disenchantment among young Balkans, who are nonetheless replete with mystic vitality, expressed with strength, urgency and a drive to reimagine and reconstruct their gray reality in saturated color.