The season is over. The Autumn wind shakes the branches of the trees, solitary witnesses in a motionless space. In a house of someone who cannot sleep, a television lightens up the pale white painted rooms. Empty hotel neon lights reflect their luminescence on the windscreen of my car. Silence is filled with small, almost imperceptible, sounds: old bulbs flickering, radiators and ventilation systems sizzling in the dark. Everything looks the same, orderly and ready. Perfectly outlined. It’s hard to not feel alone. I get out of the car and I light up a cigarette while watching a big calf vanishes like a ghost in the haze that has risen in the meantime. His story is already written. He is stuck. Nothing can be changed. Here is the light of dawn. I think about the people I lost and who has lost himself in this place. Animals speak to me and palms look like fireworks. You couldn’t feel bad.

Turistica is a long-term project (2016-2019) that I shot in some neighborhoods of Locarno, my hometown, in the southern part of Switzerland. It’s a visual journey dedicated to all the small tourist destinations and their lonely citizens.

In 2020 the project becomes a photo book edited by Witty Books, and it has been selected for several national and international exhibitions such as, among others, Vogue Italia Photovogue festival 2019 in Milan, and Aperture Summer Open 2019: Delirious Cities, at Aperture Foundation, New York.

@carlorusca