In his early twenties, my father was called for a job in the town of Arbus in southwestern Sardinia, where he stayed for four years; between excitement and fear within days he was preparing to leave a closed and oppressive reality to embrace an unknown one. The island became his America, a chance to measure himself against his own limits, discover other ways of existing, breathe more deeply. There he became an adult and met great love. Upon his return, eager to exert control over his life again, his mother and sister secretly burned every memento he had brought with him, letters, diaries, photographs, and prevented any future contact with his companion. Today, when a degenerative disease is slowly robbing him of his memory, I thought of symbolically giving him back something that was snatched away from him through fiction. The project, is in fact the staging of a journey he never made, which I imagine he took one day before the new beginning. Twenty-four hours on the road with no real direction, to explore, to draw boundaries, to measure up with another idea of home. Utopian Portrait of a Young Man, an homage to Giulio Paolini's Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto, trying to tune my gaze to his when he looked at those places for the first time.