After Fata Morgana I asked myself many times which kind of topic were relevant for me in photography. I wondered what kind of stories and which point of view to adopt.

While a was studying for a university exam one year ago I discovered that in the book of Italian history of photography were no women from South Italy mentioned. I started to be curious about who and how created an imaginary about south Italy: male photographers from North Italy. Researching and studying the historical moment were South Italy became relevant for literature, researchers, filmmakers and photographers I discovered that it was in the time neorealism was the dominant trend: cinema felt the mission to document the “true life” and photography to use the ethnographic approach to study, catalogue and archive rituals, habits and people that were living far away from capitalism and modernization.

Through this lens, South Italy appears in the movies and in the photographic archive as “primitive, underdeveloped and archaic”: a kind of exotic place where women still follow old pagan ritual and men were in contact with the land in a holistic and organic way.

I was very surprised how a capitalistic way of thinking totally flattens the reality and I was wondering how to give another storytelling to the history, the rituals, the landscapes of the place I belong.

So, I decide to start this new project, which has no name yet, but it’s on a research level: I’m including a lot of archive material produced during the ’50 y researcher, anthropologist, photographers and video maker and I’m especially interested in the role and representation of south Italian women.