Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Nicoletta Pedrana
I wanted to be a singer, and instead I'm here
to try and tell you how I became a photographer -
how it happened, actually.
It all started with my eating disorders.
I got sick at the age of 14 - 15.
I can't remember very well,
there are so many pieces of that period
which I still remember very vaguely.
I was a teenager,
and like every teenager I didn't like the way I looked.
But it wasn't just a physical dislike of myself.
It was something different: as if, suddenly,
I couldn't recognize myself in the image that I saw.
On the one hand, I believe
adolescence is the moment when we begin seeing ourselves
as the first version of a definite human being.
And what I saw didn't match my idea of myself.
But I believe that this kind of mismatch,
this detachment between me and the image I saw of myself,
played a fundamental role
in the development of my interest in the visual arts.
Photography came a few years later
on the shelves of the library of Reggio Emilia,
the city where I was born.
The first person I started photographing
was myself.
And then, in short, I never stopped.
Fast forward:
I enrolled at DAMS, I graduated, I attended a school of photography
took my diploma - well, not in that order,
and then I felt ready
for my first real photographic project.
So, I decided to work on something I knew very well:
eating disorders.
As a teenager, I wanted to lose weight.
But take this term, "lose weight", as a methaphor.
I actually wanted to become
the person that I felt I had to become.
Only I wanted it to happen immediately.
The time that had to pass
between that me, so imperfect as I then was,
and the perfect me I'd naturally be in the future
had to pass as quickly as possible.
It was a useless, agonizing, empty time,
unlike the time of photography: which, for me, fills time.
When you have a camera around your neck,
every moment is potentially
full of meaning, important and unrepeatable.
Strengthened by this material tool, which was my camera,
but also mentally,
I left for Todi.
It was back in 2006, at the Palazzo Francisci residence
one of the main centres in Italy
for the treatment of eating disorders.
I still remember that this plenary meeting
was set up with all the operators, the doctors and the patients.
I remember these 20 pairs of eyes looking at me terrified
because I was a stranger.
Moreover, a stranger with a camera.
On the other hand, I was as terrified as they were.
After speaking and introducing ourselves,
for a week or ten days
I didn't dare to take a single photo.
Instead,
I spent time with the girls, watched television, played cards,
learned how to make awful knitted scarves.
Until, one day, this girl told me:
"So when are you going to start taking pictures?"
And then I started this project,
which was called "The Odd Days"
after a song by Ludovico Einaudi I used to listen to obsessively.
At the time I didn't know
that this work would last more than three years
nor that photography would become my profession.
And I definitely didn't know
that this work would be far more than just a job,
turning into a way of understanding myself.
I call it therapy sometimes.
I don't know if it happens to you too,
but sometimes I was lucky enough
to encounter people, during my working life,
who marked important points in my journey.
One of these encounters was the one with Simona.
I met Simona in 2008
at Palazzo Francisci, where she'd been hospitalized.
It was a very hot summer and the centre was packed with patients.
Simona, at first, caught my attention because of her looks:
She was tall, as she still is today,
beautiful,
this thick black hair, these huge eyes.
And very thin, deadly thin.
I remember her,
she always kept herself to herself,
and the other patients found it hard to approach her.
There was something,
in this halo of extreme suffering that she carried with her,
which both attracted and repelled people's attention
at the same time.
I spent several days there, before deciding to approach her
and ask her if she wanted to have her photograph taken.
She answered me
with that firmness, and sweetness, that I've come to know over the years.
She told me: "Yes but not today, tomorrow.
And I would like you to come up with something beautiful."
Wow, OK.
I spent the rest of the day trying to think
about what beautiful thing I could do in such a situation.
The next morning I woke up, stopped by at a florist's shop
and bought some lilies
because I wished, as it were, to bode her well,
and that flowers could bloom from her long, gnarled arms.
And this was the beginning of a friendship
which will soon celebrate its tenth anniversary.
Meanwhile, I never stopped taking photographs of myself.
It was as if this looking out of me
violently forced me, somehow,
to look inside myself again.
So many things that I thought I knew about myself,
I had to see them again, and change them, thanks to this work.
After three or four years of work on eating disorders,
I felt that the drive
that had led me to work on this issue
was running out.
I entered a phase of utter confusion.
Meanwhile,
photography had become my job, my profession.
They asked me if I wanted to go to the Gaza Strip.
And so, caught between enthusiasm and confusion,
I agreed without thinking much.
Within literally a few days,
I found myself in a war zone.
I was terrified again, I didn't know what to expect.
Perhaps I wasn't ready to go there.
But I couldn't help thinking
I was the first woman in my family
who hadn't lived through a war.
My grandmothers had lived through World War I and II.
My mother was born at the end of World War II.
I had only heard of it.
Still, it was a bit as if this history
flowed in my family's DNA and my own.
So I decided to work not on front line,
that is, not to document the front line, but to stay at home with the women
and see what normality one could aspire to, if there was any.
But what normality could you aspire to
in a conflict situation as brutal and long-drawn
as the Israeli-Palestinian one.
I thought: "If I was looking for familiarity,
for correspondence with my life and my experience,
I could find it anywhere, I just had to look for it.
And so it was, for example, with Obi Wafa.
Wafa had lost everything during the "Cast Lead" operation,
an Israeli military operation in 2009.
She had lost her home and her son Ibrahim, nine,
who had been killed.
And one year later, when I first met her,
she was still living
with her other five children and her husband
in a tent, in the place where her house had once stood.
At first, I thought that Wafa couldn't be more different to me,
in terms of cultural background, life choices, religion...
We spoke different languages, she had kids, everything you can imagine.
Instead, Wafa and I got along very well.
I went to see her many times over the years,
when I returned to Gaza: I admired her!
She's always been a very strong person.
One thing I learned from from those trips
was to abandon a number of stereotypes
which I had about others, and also about myself.
As a rule, from my experience,
wherever I expected to find unsurmontable differences
I actually found great similarities.
Fast Forward: 2015.
Same thing in Kenya.
At one point, I met Natasha,
a Kenyan girl who was 13 at the time.
What could I have in common with this young girl?
I met her in a school in Ilbissil, a few hours by car from Nairobi.
She had taken refuge there
after escaping from genital mutilation,
from her family,
who wanted to subject her to genital mutilation
and then, as often happens in these countries, marry her off
to a man possibly much older than her.
Natasha had run away,
ended up living on the streets of Nairobi.
Then, she was taken on by a family to work for them,
but she was more of a slave than a real domestic help.
She was abused, harassed, and so on.
Until she was saved and brought to this school
which has a specific section for girls who run away from home.
Natasha was very interested in me.
She had picked up a little English on the street,
so she had decided to take on the task
to be my guide inside the school.
And she followed me everywhere, showed me everything,
and wanted to know everything about me.
What it was like to be a photographer, how to travel, and so on.
Once back in Italy, I decided to pay her school fees.
In a way, it can be said that I bring work home.
But I am glad to, it is a huge privilege.
When I was 18, I wanted to be a singer
so I enrolled on a course with Sainkho Namtchylak,
who is a Siberian singer from the republic of Tuva
and who I love very much.
On the second or third day of the seminar, I went to her and asked her:
"Do I have what it takes to become a singer?
Can I make it?"
I was 20,
she looked at me and told me something like:
"Ah, you Westerners!
Always thinking only of the result, and never of the course."
And I was very upset, clearly.
Even today,
I still remember that day perfectly.
I don't know if I understood exactly what she meant to tell me,
but I never forgot it.
Perhaps, I started to understand it thanks my job, slowly.
My job forces me to look at other people, as well as at myself.
As I told you, it doesn't allow me to remain caught in the stereotypes
that I had and I still have, willy-nilly, about other people and myself.
And perhaps, all these women I met,
Wafa, Natascha, Simona, and many others,
are pieces of that person that I wanted to become as a teenager.
Perhaps, the story of my work
is a very small piece of the story of my slow recovery.
Thank you.
(Applause)