Rome is living in a particularly critical period in dealing with new immigrants coming to the city in search of a job and a new life. One of the most visible elements of this crisis is the increasing number of illegal urban settlements.
This photo series is a small collection of these temporary and precarious "accommodations" developing both in the suburbs and in the city center. In those place, where asphalt leaves the space to nature, new immigrants (coming especially from East Europe and North Africa) can find a shelter.
The attempt of my work is to map these places, not with the intention of social denunciation or easy commiseration, but by trying to create a shared fantasy which belongs to all of us. The suggestion is the first idea we get of our world, if we think to children's drawings, where fundamental things are condensed in a landscape with a tree, a little house and some people.
This basic landscape is what I am ideally trying to recreate in my pictures. Even if the house is just a mattress under a tree, or between two bushes, that place, at that moment, represents what we consider home: protection, habit, safety, the thin line between what is inside and what is outside.
An important part of my childhood in Arizona was the camping trips we would take. In America, especially in the west, one can simply put on a back-pack, walk into the wilderness, catch a fish, build a fire and sleep on the ground. A wilderness experience had much to do with adventure: being challenged, scared and unsettled.
While people may long for the simple, carefree life in the midst of nature, they evidently find it impossible to live easily without comfort, safety and cleanliness. It is the search for a "true, wilderness experience," caught between the urge to be free and the need for security.
Terraria Gigantica examines the world's largest "glasshouses" that allow the creation of a landscape that would otherwise be impossible in that particular climate. These giant high-tech terrariums draw from a rich lineage of public conservatories cultivating the exotic. They also serve as large-scale laboratories for research on plants, animals, complex ecosystems and the effects of climate change.
While these spaces are often crowded with visitors, my experience is more solitary as my attention veers away from the carefully constructed exhibits and educational materials and into the corners and edges of the biomes — where façades crumble or illusion fades. In these liminal spaces, the natural and artificial elements often collide, overlap, bleed together and become indistinguishable.
Small details lead to big questions about what it means to create and contain landscapes and whether they supplement or replace experiences on the outside. Under the glass, I frame images and ideas, ponder the distinctions between natural and artificial, and examine the evolving "nature" of nature.
My final conclusion is that though the parks are still quite urban, in both the landscape and the psychological experience of the person visiting them, they play an integral and important part in the lives of city dwellers.
Thoreau says that "in wildness is the salvation of the world." My photographs provide a framework, but I want to leave it up to the viewer to decide if this "salvation" is possible within the concrete confines of the city.