Via Roma (RE)

This project was the result of my artist residency in via Roma, Reggio Emilia.
For seven days I lived and worked in a single street, as a guest in people’s house, and had complete freedom over how to represent my experience there.
I wanted to explore the concept of home and the identity of a place through the people inhabiting it, passing by, some born there and some just arrived.
I ended up photographing some of the people living in via Roma who are not necessarily the main characters there, those who blend in, those who might go unnoticed. Friends of friends of those who everybody knows. Rather than looking for the heart of a place, I wanted to find its connective tissue.
I worked on mixed media pieces while I was staying in a small one bedroom apartment and interviewed each one of my subjects; I then printed the resulting images on canvas, and fragments of these conversation where then embroidered onto the prints, almost invisible from a distance, but full of meaning and beauty once you get close, just like these people are.