© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series 'Blue Bar'

Cristina Comparato (CC): Memory often appears as a threshold, something to cross and retrace. It does it as a remembrance, path, and imaginary, something that we think we know but that does not belong to our concrete experience. The Po river is part of those places that we all associate with something specific: it is the most important river in Italy, a physical and ideological border, a landscape, a set of habits or cultures, and it is a "place" that we give for granted, that it has always been and that it will always be there. The photographer Matteo di Giovanni, who moved to Milan in 2014, decided to explore the Po Delta region. Meeting the stories told by a local fisherman opened up to an unknown land. He started to appreciate what it means to live in a place so intimately linked to the events of nature. The author suddenly wonders about this sense of uncertainty and interdependence between inhabitants and territory. This feeling has now almost disappeared in the big cities driven by other urgencies. The series "Blue Bar" tells how memory and stories can create new connections with identities and senses of belonging and how territories - especially the most fragile ones - increasingly need someone to collect their testimony.

What was the river Po for you, and how did your perception evolve through this work?

Matteo Di Giovanni (MDG): In my case, the Po had always been something I had heard about in school. I cannot say that I was foreign to what you are talking about, which is the fact that it is a natural, ideological border and much more, but as absurd as it may seem, I had never seen it in person. My life until then had been utterly foreign to northern Italy in general.
Before 2014, I had only gone to Milan once, and it didn't even create too many problems for me. I studied Philosophy in Rome, and then I immediately moved to London, where I started working with photography. I've always been there on the Po by plane. Once I arrived in Milan, as I usually do, I began to look around and do some laps in the area outside the city. I do not deny that the attraction for rivers, places with a strong symbolic character and rich in stories has never failed me. For this reason, I began to approach the banks of the Po, especially in the Lombardy area, and I was fascinated by it.

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series 'Blue Bar'

Since then, I have put together a series of multi-day trips heading east to the Delta. On 31 December 2016, it all started there when, due to very dense fog, I had to stop in Ariano, in the region of Polesine. As I was traveling by camper, I went to the main piazza e and spent the night between the village bar and the "motorhome". In those days, I took the first photos in the Delta, and since then, I have returned whenever possible. So, returning to your initial question: for me, the Po was something unknown that has turned into a territory of incredible charm, an unreachable and attractive underlying melancholy, and above all, a place capable of connecting me with a whole series of readings, movies, and music, which had accompanied me in previous years.

CC: In the introduction to your photographs, you talk about a local fisherman who, besides giving you the key to your journey and telling you about the fragility of living below sea level, offered himself to you as a guide along your journey. However, in the selection you propose on your website, the human presence is perhaps more present in its consequences and traces: explain this choice to us.

MdG: Yes, after the first months in which I was alone, talking a bit with the locals and photographing what struck me about the area, I realized that I needed to face the complexity of the place. As often happens, this episode was also wholly coincidental. One evening I didn't want to have yet another dinner in a camper on the river bank, so I went to a restaurant, asking if I could then sleep in their parking lot. It was practically nowhere, in the open countryside, near Bottrighe. Sitting at the table alone, taking notes and consulting the map, immediately aroused the owner's interest, who asked me what I was doing and why. The evening ended chatting and drinking wine until closing, promising to see us the next day for breakfast. The following day, after elaborating the speech the night before, he told me that he had the right person for me: a fisherman from Scardovari. And he gave me his phone number. Before calling him, I went to Scardovari to see what it was, and a couple of days later, I called. Then, in short, I found myself in front of an eclectic and at the same time available person, who since that day has practically always followed me in my movements, introducing me to the local people so as not to have problems when shooting. I ended up on fishing boats, in the so-called fishermen's houses for Sunday lunches, and amid many other experiences that I will take with me.

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series 'Blue Bar'

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series 'Blue Bar'

As for the sequence of the book, you are right; the human presence is very scarce. Mainly for two reasons: I did a lot of portraits during the four years that led to the making of the book but felt that they would not add anything to the narrative. I have included only three portraits of women, quite different from one another. In a work of this kind, women perform fundamental tasks in an intensely masculine landscape but always behind the scenes. In a certain way, I wanted to emphasize their importance through their presence in the final sequence. Secondly, I am more interested in the "signs" left by people on the land than their presence. 

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series 'Blue Bar'

CC: The need to recognize fixed points even in foreign lands is perhaps most evident in cities. A need that consumerism has translated into an increasingly standardized offer from one end of the world to the other. You pursue a similar condition in your work by looking for a bar you could no longer find the trace of. This desire refers to the adherence to one's memory, that certainty of recognizing ourselves through places, flavors, gazes. Beyond its actual existence, which remains suspended, what does the Blue Bar represent?

MdG: The discourse of standardized cities deserves a discussion of its own, to be honest. After more than twenty years spent in European and non-European capitals, I feel that they no longer have to offer what they once had. Indeed, this has to do with the standardization you are talking about and extreme gentrification that leads many artists (and not only) to take refuge in less chaotic, less expensive places where the quality of life is of tangibly superior. Then, let's assume the European capitals as an example. We can undoubtedly say that the differences that characterized them years ago are rapidly disappearing, and often one has the impression of being in the same place. The standardized offer gives security. I am more interested in the differences, which now seem to be found only in the so-called border areas. And the Po Delta is, from many points of view, a borderland.

In my opinion, the main difference lies precisely in the meaning you want to give to the word "research": on the one hand - that of the standardization of metropolises capable of providing security - we are faced with the need to have constant and continuous points of reference. On the other hand, however, we have research as a lifestyle, that is, wanting to know places and cultures and points of view different from those to which one is used to, which usually also leads to looking inside oneself.

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series 'Blue Bar'

I come from a philosophical background, where research is the basis of everything. Above all, it is continuous, never-ending, precisely because knowledge has precarious limits. It is porous (in the Greek sense of the term). For this reason, it inevitably leads to search again, even when you think you have found what you were looking for. The Blue Bar represents just that, the search for something ephemeral and metaphorical, which, once found, leads to the search for something else. Then, to say it all, inside it contains something symbolic: blue derives from the Anglo-Saxon blue feeling. That melancholy that you feel once you set foot in those territories, while the bar is par excellence the principal meeting place and exchange within cultures such as those of the Delta. Unveiled is the American theme of the Delta, as Ghirri had already identified in one of his essays. The Blue Bar is all of this.

CC: One aspect of your work that struck me is precisely this relationship between identity and memory, a search for correspondences that return something lasting. It reminded me of the struggle of the kingdom of Fantasia against the Nothing that devours all in Ende's The Neverending Story. The contemporary world seems to be falling more and more into fragility, not only the evident one given by climate change and conflicts but also by a dramatic loss of belonging, the one that comes to us from the roots, from the peculiarities, from the precious differences that every place holds. How does this fit in general in your photographic research?

MdG: Paradoxically, I was talking about Fantasy and Nothing just recently. A film for children indeed, but at the same time, it manages to tackle issues that are still extremely actual. When asked, I always say that Blue Bar tries to address two fundamental issues: the research we have just talked about, while the other is precisely the uncertainty affecting the contemporary human being. This uncertainty derives from multiple factors: the completely fragmented world of work, the almost complete separation between politics and public opinion, the loss of belonging, the lack of roots or the impossibility of reconnecting to them, often linked to the obligation to have to move for the most disparate reasons. 

I am going through a particular phase of my life. As I mentioned, my experiences in big cities and how I think they have less to offer today than they had in the past. In 1999 I wanted to leave at all costs Pescara, the city where I was born, to move to Rome, then London, Brussels, New York, London again, and then Milan. These experiences have served me a lot and made me who I am today.

Certainly, there are global issues you mentioned, which are generating quite a few problems at the level of individual psycho-physical stability. Still, the main issues are certainly the ones you listed later. By now, the differences interest relatively remote places, not even in small towns, which often transform themselves to meet the needs of tourists in search of that authenticity that now finds it hard to manifest itself. It is difficult to count the places that have lost their identity in Italy. People think of having a real, genuine experience, but they only participate in a staging. In my opinion, the area of ​​the Delta that I investigated is one of those places that escape this trap.

Not surprisingly, my next book will be precisely on the concepts of homeland, roots, belonging. I photographed the places where I was born and raised in Abruzzo at a distance of more than two decades, seeing them totally in a different perspective than when I had left them, mainly for two reasons: they changed, and I changed.

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series 'Blue Bar'

CC: It is not easy to say something new about places so much told, and we often risk involuntarily hooking up not only with easy stereotypes but also with the stories we have heard and seen. For example, it is inevitable to think of Ghirri, but also of the great American views, as you write: how did you manage to make your voice dialogue with the voices of those who preceded you?

MdG: It's a great dilemma of photography. If you don't accept that everything has been done and everything has been said, you better stop taking pictures. At the same time, however, I assume that taking inspiration and reworking is a completely natural thing that should be explored.

On the one hand, I must say that my photographic background is thoroughly Anglo-Saxon, so - mea culpa - I only discovered Guidi, Ghirri, etc., in the last few years. I should not be proud of that, but it's to say that my story has been entirely different, and I've learned to take a cue and then develop my vision of things. Ghirri impressed me by saying that you cannot help but feel melancholy when crossing the Po. There can be no more accurate thing.

The issue is that in our country, we often try, in photography as in other disciplines, to categorize and give labels such as "landscape photographer," "conceptual," "photojournalist," etc... Still, in reality, everything is more complex. I might be close to a "documentary" tradition, but then everything declines according to one's aesthetics, training, and way of being in front of the world that surrounds us. I constantly look at the works of other photographers, especially books. I have hundreds of them, but often the source of inspiration for one of my projects comes from elsewhere: from cinema, music, literature. Perhaps this is how I manage to make my voice dialogue with authors much more important than me.

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series 'Blue Bar'

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series 'Blue Bar'

CC: Yours is a precise path that winds between identity and human limits, crossing anthropology, sociological investigation: how did you develop it, and what were your references?

MdG: For years I have thought that photography is one of the best ways to tackle such complex and interconnected problems. It comes from my studies and my personal experiences. And I try to translate all this into photography, trying to do my best.
In his most important theoretical work, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger was the first to say that the "word" and the "language" could not explain complex concepts such as that of being. Yet this does not mean that simply by replacing the word with the image, we can explain and give meaning to the most complex concepts. For a long time, I have felt that photography has the characteristic of not being univocal. For this very reason, it ends up having greater strength in dealing with the issues you have spoken about.

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series 'Blue Bar'

My references are many; some fixed points and others alternate as recent discoveries or "encounters" in the vaguest sense of the word, which, however, leave a mark. I would start with the music and the two often with me artists: Tom Waits and Nick Cave. They greatly influenced the work on the Po, for example. Jim Jarmusch links to Tom Waits. Not long ago, I was talking to a French critic who pointed out that the first scene of Daunbailò had many points in common with the sequence of Blue Bar. And I can guarantee I didn't plan it. Sometimes we are also faced with references that move more in the subconscious than anything else. Apart from the great masters of American photography that we all know and who cannot fail to have influenced my way of photographing and that of many others, I mention some names that were fundamental in my training and that I got to know personally: Simon Roberts, Joachim Brohm, Tim Carpenter, Gus Powell, Mark Power. I don't want to bore you with a very long list... Then there are photographers of my generation and even younger ones with whom I regularly compare myself. Among the teachers, above all, David Campany. Returning to Tom Waits, I've been trying to set up a work starting from his song God's Away on Business for years, and I hope to succeed sooner or later. Multiple readings, but if we talk about frontiers and borders, I would say Cormac McCarthy always and in any case.

CC: How is your approach transformed - if it did - as you enter the fragile habitability of this region? What has it left you?

MdG: Blue Bar was born according to a much more documentary tradition unlike the first work, which was pure, liberating on the road. However, it has deliberately faded away during my continuous travels. I understood that I was not interested in telling the life of the Delta fishermen, but a much deeper existential condition of which the Delta and its distinctive signs perfectly represented the background on which to act. Somehow, I created my vision of the Delta, where existential precariousness, time circularity, and attachment to a specific community are the main themes. All this was possible thanks to a complete immersion within a community and a territory, a privilege granted to me by the people who live it every day.
I had confirmation of the metaphorical and symbolic power of photography, which is becoming an increasingly important aspect in my way of working. The real change is here.

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series 'Blue Bar'

CC: What are you up with now?

MdG: Blue Bar is the second chapter of what I like to call a loose trilogy, that is, a trilogy linked by a basic theme, which is precisely that of the landscape as a metaphor. It's the central chapter of a triptych that begins with a trip to the North Cape and ends in my homeland. The next book will be published in September 2022, just near the opening of an exhibition at the Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin, the title of which comes from an excerpt from Melville's Moby Dick: True Places Never Are. Precisely with this, I want to underline the fantastic character of photography, which can "create worlds," as Ghirri himself said, just as it gives us that idea of ​​suspension that I often feel the need for. The issue of leaving places suspended without giving information on where and when is not accidental. In my head, the delta of the Po could be in many other sites, and the questions are much more universal than one might think.

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series 'Blue Bar'

My last work has as its central theme the lack of roots and connections with the land where I was born—the lack of belonging if we want to call it that. I was born in Abruzzo. I grew up there and left. I have ties to that land, but I wouldn't call them traditional. They are memories of a past that are getting further away, but no strong connection with one's homeland that I see in others. It is undoubtedly the result of my family history and my experiences, but it is an issue that I have been dealing with for some time. Yet it was when I had to go back for about a year for personal matters that I started photographing a territory that had never aroused particular interest in me. But, perhaps, just being away from it so much has brought to light a latent curiosity that has prompted me to undertake this work.

Here too, the theme of identity returns.

Matteo di Giovanni (personal website)