On Saturday 10 October I will be a guest of the Ladri di Luce photographic association for Via Savoia: a story inside the city, a special event featuring a screening of the documentary about the occupation of Via Savoia in Cosenza. We will discuss reportage, testimony and ways of looking at reality: my work as a photographer and the responsibility that begins when an image enters people’s lives.
Talk and screening
Via Savoia: a story inside the city
Saturday 10 October 2026 · 7:30 pm
CRUC – Quartiere Nervoso
Via Giuseppe Verdi · 87036 Rende (CS), Italy
Free admission
Photography as responsibility
Social photography is not, for me, a territory separate from the rest of my practice. It is a way of standing before reality without reducing a person to the circumstances in which we meet them. In Via Savoia I sought the presence of its residents, the light in the rooms, the gestures and thresholds of a place shaped by the housing crisis. Reportage documents, but it should not claim to explain entirely the person who appears within the frame.
The Via Savoia reportage was made on 2 January 2019. The documentary adds duration and sequence to the photographs: it restores the relationship between faces and space, between the story of an occupation and the everyday life that such a story risks leaving outside the frame.
Fashion and social issues are not separate worlds
The previous evening, Friday 9 October, Punk Aristocracy will open in Cosenza. Moving from fashion photography to a work such as Via Savoia does not mean changing identity. In both, I am interested in the body, representation, power and the way an image constructs or unsettles a definition.
Fashion can become a language through which to question conformity, desire and belonging. Social reportage requires another stance and another responsibility, but it does not abandon those questions. The context and the relationship with people change; the need remains to understand who can be seen, how they are seen and who decides the meaning of a body within an image.
From Terra! to Via Savoia
Cosenza holds a precise place in this journey. On 22 December 2018 I brought Terra! to the city, the solo exhibition developed from photographs made during migrant landings and aboard the Aquarius. It remained on view until 30 December at the headquarters of Il Quotidiano del Sud and was promoted by the Institute of Historical Studies of Cosenza with the Mario Dodaro Foundation.
Those images began circulating again in 2026 through MedPress — Mediterranean Press Photo. I retraced their journey in Aquarius on MedPress: the images of Terra! still concern us. From sea to land, and then from land to the question of inhabiting: Via Savoia continues this attention to people after the news has seemingly moved elsewhere.
From MACRO Asilo to Rende
The event with Ladri di Luce will follow the spirit of Where is the future? Dove è il futuro?, which I presented at MACRO Asilo in Rome on 13 April 2019: photographs, film and public conversation bringing the image together with the context that produced it. It will not be a repetition, but a return of the same questions to the territory where Via Savoia took place.
Ladri di Luce works to share a passion for photography and promote photographic culture and the visual arts. It is the right setting in which to discuss not only how an image is made, but what an image can bear witness to and what it must leave open.
I look forward to seeing you on Saturday 10 October at 7:30 pm at CRUC – Quartiere Nervoso in Rende. Admission is free.