Fata Morgana

Fata Morgana is the name of a complex mirage that distorts objects and then fades very quickly. The Fata Morgana is visible from the region I belong in the southern part of Italy, Salento, and it gives the illusion to see Albanian mountains from the Adriatic Sea: but to me it represents a powerful metaphor of our contemporary geopolitical situation.

Salento, like all of Europe, has recently become a false place of wonder and hope for people who are fleeing from Africa or Meddle East: but the pictures taken by photo-reporters and showed on newspapers often reduce migrants lives and histories to few and common stereotypes.

As well in the last years the visual identity of Apulia region and Salento, that is as part of this territory, has be flatted by a touristic marketing that creates and promotes stereotypes and deletes diversities and contrasts.  

This project represents my willingness to create a visual complexity around topics so relevant in the contemporary European scenario but as well to think about the role of photographers, which are powerful promoters of meanings, ideas and opinions.

During the next 3 years I’ve worked on different issues connected with the past and the recent history of Salento, a land of transition since centuries, trying to offering a new conception of them, telling a story from the South of the Mediterranean, so often just an object of observation and not the protagonist of the contemporary tale.

Fata Morgana includes very different style and gender: portraits of foreign people who live and work in a legal or illegal way in my region, documentary pictures of the landscape, stage photography, still life etc.

This project is a storytelling in between realty and fiction, a way to underline the impossibility of represent and define.