N

The project ‘N’ illustrates the conflicted nature of an Italian province and the relationship between it and a section of its inhabitants, in particular the generation in their 30s. Young people with solid backgrounds and training, who have to confront (in the desperate search for a future stability) the contemporary provincial dynamics in which they are trapped, hanging in the balance of leaving or staying, of the desire for a different future and, at the same time, a desire not to give up on their country. Places in which one must live according to pre-established logic, dictated by a kind of rule from above which prescribes a “normal” existence and “standard” behaviour, a certain type of mentality: the perfect family, idyllic love, the denial of deep cultural values and the celebration of basic entertainment, and working a job without much aspiration. Yet what is normality? Like a huge black hole, this place seems to swallow us up. There is often a fine thread, at times imperceptible, between a place of belonging and its inhabitants. And what about ambition? The desire to grow for those who try just a little to break out of traditional modes of existence? The videos show the surface of apparent beauty as the dilated time of these places. The photographs instead, like x-ray images, are a way to go inside them and see what happens to the protagonists who live on the limits of a European periphery.⁠