I grew up listening to my grandparents' stories about war, hunger, and the desire for redemption that led an impoverished region to the beating heart of the Italian economy through sacrifice and unbridled dedication to work. If I think about these stories and their traces in the area, three words immediately come to mind: work, "schei", and warehouses. I took all this for granted for a long time until one day when I returned to Veneto, I found myself inside these realities. After obtaining a degree in philosophy from the University of Trieste, I found a job at a logistics warehouse in Montebelluna in the province of Treviso (my hometown, in Italy). It was supposed to be a temporary occupation, but it has become an integral part of my life for six years now. This passage marked a radical change in my life, and it is precisely in this transition between the silent and meditative environments of university libraries and the frenetic daily life of the unloading/loading and production areas that I discovered my passion for analog photography. I started working with my colleagues from all over the world: China, Morocco, Ghana, Brazil, Nigeria, Romania, Albania, and others). Some passed through this area; others lived there for almost twenty years. Most of the workers were Chinese immigrants, and over time, I became closer and closer to them. It wasn't easy, but after about a year, the respectful relationship between us allowed me to take photographs of them and to be able to meet them outside of work. From this meeting, I felt vividly those stories of hunger and desire for redemption that my grandparents told me and inspired this project. "工作, gōng zuò" (A Northeastern Story) aims to visually tell the relationship that I perceived between the people who lived in this Northeast (farmers, entrepreneurs, metal workers...) more than sixty years ago and the Chinese communities that today are an integral part of the development of this territory. I started looking for old family photos and photographing everyday reality, particularly at work, thanks to a small analog camera, and thinking about bringing these two distant realities into contact. The proposed selection features black and white photos from the archive and from the present day to trigger the viewer with a temporal and cultural short circuit that brings on the same level the construction of my great-grandparents' first shed more than sixty years ago and the working reality of the Chinese community I met.