For the past two years, I have been working on my first long-term project on the territory of the Aosta Valley. I investigated the phenomenon of mountain depopulation that affects small villages under 300 inhabitants and how people living in these contexts experience their isolation.
The project is about a mountain untethered from tourism and what we might call a geographic microcosm often seen in a superficial and idealized way. There is a strong spiritual component in the work related to how people live and transform the mountain territory, giving much importance to the human-nature relationship as something almost ancestral.
This work represents something extremely significant for me personally as well as my photographic journey. In the last phase of this project, I tried to live in the Aosta Valley for a short period, in an attempt to get in touch with a reality distant from my own experience and empathize more with the locals.
I am currently in the editing phase of the project and would like to make a book of it alongside a traveling exhibition within the hamlets themselves, so as to bring people to discover the charm that distinguishes these isolated villages and perhaps prevent them from becoming, as is often the case, ghost towns.
I hope to succeed in this ambitious project of finding a publishing house that might be interested in releasing it in a book form. It has been a long and challenging journey, making me visit the entire region far and wide, through snowy winters and torrid summers, going back and forth between valleys in search of new places to explore unique stories.
Photography, as I mentioned earlier, has been an ideal medium to visually communicate these stories and to allow one to keep a record of what remains of these places and perhaps offer a renewed glimpse to those who, like me, come from a completely different background.