Sometimes, to avoid feeling too much pain, I choose to take distance.
Since childhood, I’ve lived with the 800 kilometers that separated me from my extended family — grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins — and in some way, I “thanked” that distance. It taught me to get used to their physical absence, silently preparing me for the day they would be gone. When that day came, the pain hit hard, but faded quickly — intense at first, then slowly quieter.
Perhaps it’s fear. The fear of not being able to bear an overwhelming emotion. And so, I distance myself from it too.
Presenza was born from this emotional mechanism — a project that confronts memory and loss in a detached way, not out of lack of love, but as a form of self-protection. I didn’t want the work to be emotionally overwhelming for the viewer, because it isn’t for me either.
The absence of my loved ones lives on not only in my feelings, but also — and perhaps more strongly — in the spaces they once inhabited. Some of these places remain untouched, treated like quiet mausoleums. Others were renovated shortly after I photographed them, giving the images a documentary value in addition to a personal one.
Presenza is a gentle conversation with what remains: places, objects, habits, and the fragile echo of memory.