“Where have you been? “ is a project carried out during the months of lockdown in Milan. From March 30.2020 to May 04.2020 (phase 2)
I virtually traveled around Italy through Street Viewer: one place a day, producing a total of 90 images. By inserting different avatars of myself in the appropriate images.
The inspiration was 1984’s “Viaggio in Italia” created by Luigi Ghirri with the participation of 20 photographers. I have not mapped the same places of the “journey” but I have recovered the aptitude, in what Gianni Celati writes in the preface of the book, geographical spaces that appear “when we take the wrong road or are lost or tired, or in the stops of travel, or in empty days, in the afternoons when you don’t know where to take refuge “.
The idea of the place as a psychogeographic drift and the avatar as the wrong flaneur. The images are “appropriate” from Street Viewer toned in black and white, a black and white that leaves room for pixels as they turn into analog grain, mimicking the Zavattinian neorealism and the images of Strand remembered in the stop in Luzzara. Places appeared day by day without a precise plan, names buried in atlases and subsidiaries, distant echoes, sounds, places I have been or have never been.
The flow of images transformed as the journey went on in the flow of memory and like a game of Chinese boxes the memories became entangled and unwound like spirals. Visiting the Museum of the Memory of the Ustica massacre in Bologna, Christian Boltansky’s installation around the remains of DC9. In Casarza delle Delizie on the tomb of Pierpaolo Pasolini. To Amatrice in the places of the 2016 earthquake, to discover that Google does not update the images (I have inserted a photo found); Capaci on the A29 where Giovanni Falcone, his wife and four men in the escort lost their lives on 23 May 1992 at the hands of the Cosa Nostra. I end up in Codogno with the sound of the resuscitation fans where it all began on February 21st. On May 4th I return to Milan, phase 2 begins, people can go out into the streets, go back for a walk and run on the Martesana.
The images of the last frames are black, there are apexes nervously awaiting the text of a story that has yet to arrive, of which neither the beginning nor the end is known. (the video contains 50 images selected from the complete corpus of 90 where the places visited follow the calendar chronology one place per day).
Below the whole images travel diary:
