© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series "I Had to Shed My Skin"

Resuming Matteo Di Giovanni's research allows us to delve into some issues that deserve a closer look. We had left him to investigate the river Po, an essential element for the inhabitants of those lands, a reason for exploration for him, who still did not know those lands. Today we find him wondering about belonging and the meaning our roots can assume when they are challenging to recognize.  To find them, he looked again at the profiles of the mountains that saw him grow. He retraced the streets of his childhood, the doors under which he lived his experiences, and found the same window sills with the same plants. He re-crossed a physical space and concrete to return to inhabiting a space in memory.

The story begins symbolically because the first photo immediately recalls the memory of the home where he was born, with that unmade bed that seems to have welcomed dozens of newborns. A mosquito net evokes a bride's veil, and finally, the frame, a border-tool, as the border of the family nucleus, is generally the home. But the bed is empty, the veil is lifted and the frame contains no pictures. Scrolling through the photos, we find village bars, gates, window sills, bowls, and mailboxes. At first glance, it seems like an uninhabited place, while tomatoes appear to dry and walls rich in decorations, a sign of an almost astonishing form of vitality.

Matteo Di Giovanni (MDG): When I left my homeland in 1999, I immediately felt a sense of lightness. I was going to Rome to undertake my studies in Philosophy, and I was convinced that what awaited me would be totally different from the past. And it was. If you like, this is the first real change in my life that, without knowing it, would have taken me in directions I never imagined. Or at least they weren't planned at all. I never thought I'd return to do photographic work on it some 20 years later. But this relates to the fact that once a change has been set in motion, it can open up numerous roads that are not always calculable. The first signs came in 2013 when I had to spend a few months at home for personal reasons, and in my spare time, I saw the places where I grew up differently, with eyes without the prejudices that had always accompanied me. Finally, that detachment allowed me to look at everything with new eyes.

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series "I Had to Shed My Skin"

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series "I Had to Shed My Skin"

The series "Blue Bar" opened with a form of extraneousness, that of the visitor towards a new place; this new stage - the third in a trilogy - instead retraces a different type of extraneousness, perhaps more difficult to signify and to translate, namely the one with what we commonly call "Home." You set off from the North Cape, crossed the Po Delta region, and are back where you started. But you had to shed your skin to do it.

MDG: You have drawn the path perfectly. The first work allowed me to understand my relationship with space following a traumatic event that changed my perception of what surrounds me. The second is the exploration of an important place on a political and sociological level, but almost entirely unknown to me, but also a metaphor for the transience of human existence in general. Living in a land that can disappear instantly following the breaking of an embankment barrier is a strong metaphor that highlights the stubbornness of the human being and his perseverance.
On the other hand, photographing the places of adolescence took a lot of work. Precisely for this reason, I wanted to give it a similar structure. A road trip within a region I partially knew, making the discoveries dialogue with the places I've been to countless times. These, almost magically, have sometimes changed radically, and others have remained almost identical to themselves.

If, in the previous work, you move within a shared fragility, that of a territory understood as an interconnected ecosystem, here the fragility embraces the emotional level more explicitly, highlighting the risk that a fragmented or dispersed identity runs at the moment in which he does not recognize his landscape or does not find one to inhabit.

MDG: That's it. In this work, I wanted to showcase my wandering soul, but at the same time, my need to have a place to return to, where to find comfort, where to "put the pieces back together" and start again—reluctantly, saying that Abruzzo is not (yet) all this for me. I'm starting to feel the lack of firm roots to hold on to, something I've never had.

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series "I Had to Shed My Skin" 

I make a parallel, perhaps naive, because I compare your bewilderment, your search for an inner landscape, to the bewilderment I read in the animals you depict. The first is a personal bewilderment, given by way of living that perhaps has never been given, and the second is a bewilderment by loss caused by the continuous alterations of the territory. The failure of the landscape always continues to decline on a double track, that of the psychological experience, which is combined with a sharing of spaces and worlds in an increasingly risky balance.

MDG: Although it is a personal journey, I have tried, as I often do, not to precisely give geographical or temporal coordinates to universalize the experience of those who look at the book as much as possible. Mine is a search for roots and safe places; for others, it may be a search for something else. However personal a job may be, there is always the external aspect of what surrounds us that cannot go unnoticed. The imbalance of the landscape is part of the experience of exploring those known and unknown spaces.

Following the topic of the landscape or, more precisely, of the environment, here, too, there is a reflection on human action seen both in its transience concerning the significant elements of the Earth (for example, in the image where the unrecognizable ruins of a house are located next to a huge boulder, solid and stable - without forgetting the peak that soars in the distance), but also in its brutality, like the one we see in the contrast between the wind turbines and the beauty of the horses.

MDG: Although Abruzzo is a virgin land compared to the neighboring regions, human interference is not lacking, which often annihilates places and transforms their natural poetry. In addition, the area has recently been hitten by catastrophic natural events that have put it to the test. L'Aquila and Amatrice (which was part of Abruzzo before the establishment of the province of Rieti in the Fascist era) are the most striking examples. Off-shore drilling in the Adriatic Sea (we have to understand if there are no connections between the two things) has caused countless gestures of protest by the local population and environmental associations. Paradoxically, not being in the spotlight makes it easier to become prey, as it was years ago for the region of Basilicata. Many need to learn that it is Europe's largest inland oil field! And there, the situation is truly dramatic. My Ph.D. project was totally based on that theme. I just had to put it off for now, but I plan to start working on it soon.

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series "I Had to Shed My Skin"

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series "I Had to Shed My Skin" 

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series "I Had to Shed My Skin"

Yours is not only a critical approach, however, because human action is sometimes also aimed at treatment or prevention, and manages to integrate with the territory in a discreet, almost timid way, as one would think by looking at the niche carved into the rock; symbol of a religious past that was content to find a personal, intimate recollection. One word that comes to mind looking at your images is residue. Even though the landscape necessarily refers to an anthropized imaginary, in your research it seems to touch a post-human situation, where only a residue of man remains.

MDG: These words of yours strike me for two reasons: the first is because they precisely capture my stroke. They center on what I'm looking for when I move through space. That absence of presence is close to my heart. Secondly, the initial title of the work had to be "Traces," a word very close to "residues."

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series "I Had to Shed My Skin"

A trivial question now, which can still offer a good argument: you left an empty bed, an uninhabited house, you crossed thresholds, days, you ate, you rested: what meaning do your origins have today? Have you found a landscape that you feel is yours?

MDG: I've partially answered you before, and unfortunately, I can't say I found it, but I finally understood that I needed it. And I'm about to move home and city again. And it's the 24th! My grandmother used to say that I was "a lost soul," one of those with no place in any Dantesque group. I sincerely hope he was wrong.

Many photographers move along paths of investigation of the territories, and many commissioned works orient toward this direction. Leaving aside fashions and trends, I think that this "feeling of loss" is shared by many and that a large part of these searches arise from a personal need, from an urgency that is impossible to ignore, as it was for you.
Today, in particular, we see how the even more dramatic climate change adds to the emotional and social loss, which inevitably calls into question the present and challenges the future.

MDG: Disorientation now belongs to our generation; our parents had more (apparent) security because everything seemed to have taken the right direction. It didn't happen that way, and we are paying for the consequences. Some are directly committed to combating this loss of references; others do so by submitting the problems they see. But as you rightly say, it has become virtually impossible to ignore.

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series "I Had to Shed My Skin"

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series "I Had to Shed My Skin"

© Matteo Di Giovanni from the series "I Had to Shed My Skin"

You've just completed a trilogy, an important journey, now what?

MDG: This is the question you should always expect! Indeed many ideas in mind, the Basilicata one I mentioned, the desire to work on the fleeting border of Eastern Europe. In the meantime, however, I have been working to create an exhibition of the three works together for the first time entitled "True Places Never Are." We opened in Berlin on June 1st at the Robert Morat Galerie with a wonderful setting—lots of work behind it. Giving uniformity to the three works was not easy. It all started in June of last year when I was having lunch in Milan with David Campany (Interview "Photography is a Passport", Urbanautica 2016), my past professor at Westminster, who proposed the idea​​, having noticed so many similarities between the three works. He suggested working on it by considering the outtakes never published and making a new volume entitled "True Places Never Are," a quotation from Melville's Moby Dick that appears in the first of three books. The moment in which Ahab decides to drop everything and only chase the whale, one enters an unknown, unreal, metaphysical world. We are working hard on it together with an American publisher, and I can't wait to give you more information about the work.

Let's conclude with a step back, returning to the Po, on what you have documented and what recent floods have recently destroyed. Do you feel the need to go back to those places as a photographer and as a human being?

MDG: It's a question I asked myself during this period, and I would have already gone if I didn't find myself in a time of complex change: home/studio/city, etc. I hope soon to take a tour of the areas I've photographed. As you know, I prefer to photograph places after something has happened and not while it's happening, so it's definitely on the "to-do list." The change generated by human beings, Nature, or both always remains at the center of my reflection, so I feel the need to return.

Matteo Di Giovanni (website)
Interview "Blue Bar" (Urbanautica, 2022)