The pictures of this project – taken alongside the Aniene, a river which runs near my house – are a silent meditation on time and death, they came in a moment of personal loss, transition and profound change. “When it hurts,” wrote the Polish poet Czeslaw Miłosz, “we return to the banks of certain rivers”, and I’ve returned to the Aniene over and over again: sometimes I just stared at the surface in silence, haunted by sparkles of light, sometimes I walked down humid paths, passing by reeds and naked trees. Always the same, always different. Fiction. From the latin fingere, which means to shape, form, originally to knead form out of clay. Isn’t photography a way to shape a personal vision? Much more than a simple visual diary, photography is a chance to break our ordinary perception, a unique way to investigate reality. I asked myself: what is this world, really? We’re supposed to be free and yet there’s so much that occurs beyond the perimeters of our command. We don’t choose the moment when we leave, no one of us can shift the position we’ve been assigned in time. And we can’t bring back those we love once they’re gone, time flows in one direction only. To the river is the result of a personal journey. An interior landscape, I guess. A threshold, where past and present meet, mistically, like to tributaries of the same river. The camera sources, selects, captures pieces of reality, but the eyes are always wounded, always corrupted by memory. There is no possibility of understanding my presence, nor of grasping a definitive meaning to my relationship with nature and time.