My photographic practice aims to represent a visual documentation of urban landscapes across different cities with a shared history of social, political, productive, and anthropological transformations.

I have always approached photography as a research language and a tool for documenting places and their social (hi)stories. After two years (2016-2018) of documenting grassroots activism in the student city of Bologna, where I lived for a decade, I shifted my focus away from photojournalism towards a slower practice framing subjects that, although different, are intertwined by a similar political common thread.

Visually, my work presents itself in the guise of a straight photography framing central as well as suburban street scenes and architectures, factories and industrial landscapes, commercial ports and waterfront views, infrastructures, and heritage-listed buildings. Conceptually, I consider this ongoing body of work as an archival investigation on cultural landscapes and place narratives of working-class and urban cultures, revolving particularly around the issues of their memory, identity, and heritage.

The prominence of concrete forces of labor, and the raw materialism of our modernity’s industrial production and maritime trades, disclose a sense of precariousness and uncertainty that has become prominent and factual in the last few decades, with globalization radically altering the social ecologies of communities built around such productive motifs.

How much have these forces of labor impacted on the ways our communities have developed a sense of self and built their identities, myths, and narratives? What kind of memory have they shaped? Is it shared and collective or fragmentary and partial? Are these forces still operating? Or, if not, how does their legacy live on?

These questions share the assumption that the historical processes that have premised the emerging of communities that altogether account to a liminal civilization dwelling on geographical and social margins are radically political.

The personal reasons behind my practice are to be found in my family history which traces back to the blocks of public housing in the industrial and working-class outskirts of Napoli, Italy, a major port city and trade hub in the Mediterranean basin. The history of my working-class family is inextricably tied to one of the largest steel producers in Europe, where my grandfather has worked for many decades. I was born near these same steelworks not long before the process of its dismission started. Such dismantling of industrial sites in a city like Napoli, where socio-economic disadvantage has always been rampant, has never been met with adequate projects of economic transition, and has therefore resulted in local communities facing the voids of an uncertain and unpredictable future.

The reason why I chose photography as a language of self-expression in this survey on the living history of working-class cultures is due to its peculiar ways of enmeshing visuality and materiality. Photography’s complicated relationship with indexicality and iconicity, its unique capacity of hanging between the detailed fragment and the declamatory affirmation, has brought me to consider its visual power as revelatory rather than representational, effectively conveying the agency of material forces while also transcending into their conceptual and historical underpinnings.

The urge to search for these traces represents a way of expressing my diasporic feelings of longing for “home” over more than a decade after departing the place where I grew up.

This consideration has brought me to frame this expanded project as an ever-open atlas to urban cultures, a personal articulation of that archival impulse and that tension across past, present, and future that is so constitutive and intrinsic to the photographic language.