A couple of years ago, the Calabrian anthropologist Vito Teti drew my attention to his essay *La restanza* (Einaudi, 2022). It was Teti himself who, in the past, brought this now-obsolete term back into use, referring to the many inhabitants of Southern Italy who choose to remain in their home towns, but also to those who leave and who, despite being far away, maintain a symbiotic bond with their past and their homeland.
Having been born and raised in Calabria – and having subsequently moved to the United States for almost a decade – has meant that my personality has split in two, like a photograph torn in two. The theme of duality is a constant in my life, just as it is for anyone who has left their homeland.
Over the years, I have reflected at length on the theme of duality and the divided self, the inevitable inner conflict, the feeling of being anchored to a sort of nameless melancholy and, at the same time, living halfway between two cultures. In photographic terms, these feelings are inevitably reflected in the act of tearing, which, in effect, creates a third temporal dimension in which past and present merge. In this case, the past lives on in the analogue photographs I took between 2010 and 2012 in New York; the present, in a series of recent photographs of friends – mostly athletes – whose poses draw inspiration from Hellenistic-period statues, Hollywood stars such as James Dean, or simply photographic references from my childhood – from Wilhelm von Gloeden to Walter Pfeiffer to Terry Richardson.
Restart/Restanze is an ongoing project and is ultimately intended as a personal reflection on the current state of photography, its future, and the importance of the past in any evolutionary and artistic process.
