Fata Morgana

I’ve started to work Fata Morgana project in 2015 because as photographer I was feeling irritated by the pictures that show with too much superficiality scenes of migrants in the aim to reach our coast. I decided to set up other photos from my point of view and esthetic: I’ve used some watermelons to speak metaphorically about people who are fleeing their homes in search of a better life. During the next 2 years I’ve continued working on other topics connected with this phenomena as the clandestine migration and the exploitation of seasonal workers, offering a new conception of them, esthetically less dramatic but not less significant. Fata Morgana is the name of a complex mirage that distorts objects and then fades very quickly. The Fata Morgana is visible from my region in the southern part of Italy, Salento, and it gives the illusion to see Albanian mountains from the Adriatic Sea: but to me it represents a powerful metaphor of contemporary geopolitical situation. Salento, like all of Europe, has recently become a false place of wonder and hope for people who are fleeing from Africa or Meddle East: but the pictures taken by photo-reporters and showed on newspapers often reduce migrants lives and histories to few and common stereotypes. This project represents my willingness to create a visual complexity around these topics so relevant in the contemporary European scenario but as well to think about the role of photographers, which are powerful producers of meanings, ideas and opinions. Fata Morgana includes portraits of foreign people who live and work in a legal or illegal way in my region, descriptive and evocative pictures of some elements of the landscape, still life of symbol of the exploitation of seasonal workers and some metaphoric component as the mirage of Albanian Mountains. This project is a storytelling in between realty and fiction: I’ve tried to create an alternative vision and increase curiosity to know much more about the ones we consider different from our social and cultural identity.