“Definirti è limitarti” is a participatory, multi-disciplinary, and independent research project that combines documentary photography with a long-term urban ethnography (by anthropologist Paolo Grassi, post-doc fellow at Politecnico di Milano). Started in 2016 and still ongoing, the project is about the life story of Don Berry (1972-2020): a street poet who was based in north Italy. The project is deliberately left open to reworks: the subject becomes the author himself. Don Berry’s biography orbits around two contrasting poles: the negative one, reflected by the uncertainties he had to face (housing instability, economic insecurity, mental distress, and alcohol abuse); and the positive one: the unconditional love, his passion for science-fiction, the poems he used to write on the city walls. This complexity is proposed to the reader through “a layered account” (to use a sociologist Carol Rambo Ronai’s category). Surreal, rough photographs that portray the protagonist’s daily life, together with old science-fiction film frames, a deep ethnography, and his poems, give birth to a semi-real and semi-fictional landscape. A polyphonic story that reflects his vague perception of the city where he lived. A dense narrative where the subject has a say about the representation he is subjected to; a provocation to the monodirectional relationship author-subject. “Definirti è limitarti” challenges the preconceptions on marginalities, not flattening its protagonist on a pietist or “pornographic” representation, but recognizing his ironical vigour and dynamism.   COPYRIGHTS Pictures number 04, 09, and 15, are frames from Star Trek, Season 1, NBC TV, 1966   TRANSLATIONS 02: Obedience is like suicide. 11.1: Late night, Milan under pouring rain, Piazzale Loreto... Cocaine had played the last hand to Katia. She remembered those pleasant days strolling around with Berry, out in the fields, while he was reading her D’Annunzio’s poems. She did smile! Everything is glimmering... Gold! Shiny gold… 11.2: Dux, Don Berry, Uncle Adolf Mount Olympus; where gods cry! 11.3: I like you too much Katia Lots, lots and lots! Come back... 13. God envies us because he cannot die.