Filipo Romano was born in Messina in 1968 and raised in Milan, the city where he still lives and spends most of his time. He studied at ISIA, in Urbino, and then New York City at the ICP. We actually started photographing when he was sixteen with a Yashica. A Christmas present by the father. «I wanted to document my travels with interrail, and I hoped to photograph Berlin and Lisbon» he said. It was 1986 and he still had neither an idea nor a specific interest in taking photographs. Until in 1989 when he bought the catalog of the exhibition "Dialectical Landscape". Shortly after he saw a photographic exhibition and a documentary on Robert Frank in Lugano, where he also bought the magnificent book "The Lines of My Hand". These were two powerful and stimulating visions but quite distant from each other, yet, they pushed him to reflect and start a journey on the border of different languages.
Filippo has a poetic memory of Milano: «In the intersection between Santa Marta and San Maurilio, a bakery run by a guy from Palermo. Right in front of a barber. On the corner, night and day, two old prostitutes. A little further, the lady selling chickens, the trattoria Vecchia Milano, and the one-star hotel Santa Marta. I still smell the old stationery at the corner of the five streets when I enter some old Milanese stationery. We arrived in 1974 almost by chance. For 4 years, my family had lived in Sesto San Giovanni, the city of the big industries Marelli and Falck; then we ended up in the heart of Milan. It is the area where I am grown up, a place where a middle class still existed and where the historic bourgeoisie lived side by side with the first migration from southern Italy, the lower Po Valley, and the Veneto. In the street San Maurilio, there was a charcoal burner until the early eighties. Some houses had not been renovated and had coal heating. Then the eighties came with the expulsion of tenants. None of my elementary school companions live in the area; many have ended up in Rozzano and Gratosoglio. All the shops mentioned above have become antique shops, the Santa Marta hotel is a 4-star hotel, and at the Trattoria Vecchia Milano the "Cotoletta" (traditional cutlet) costs more than twenty euros. Many writers, intellectuals, and famous architects lived in the area. Still, to my knowledge, nobody has ever written a single line on the gentrification that took place around the places of their daily life.» It seems like a childish flashback, but in truth, these words hide the awareness of the fate of the city that changes without ever asking. And often heedless of our memories.
© Filippo Romano on a train
Memory is made up of images. A passion that led Filippo to teach. Since 2011 he has been teaching at the Naba in Milan and at the Master Iuav in Venice for 3 years. "For me, teaching is building a dialogue and listening around the student's creative growth. I wouldn't say I like to teach a precise photography idea; I don't have a style to teach. I push students to confront themselves with the experience of places and contexts and seek 360 degrees of narrative tools to make their idea of a photographic project grow. " He feels like being a sort of tutor who appreciates when a project is born from an idea of listening even before being a product built predominantly on a recognizable aesthetic. Filippo is well aware of the radical shifts that have occurred recently in the photographic practice. «In the age of networks, photography has truly become a language accessible to all, and like a mad planet, it has imploded in thousands of adrift asteroids, largely conveyed by the pseudo-democracy of Instagram and Facebook. Perhaps today, Benjamin would write the essay "photography in the era of its technical playability". Today the plagiarism is in the shallow copy of a style, in the unconscious simulation of a language, an action that is the result of a broken curiosity a bit like the urge to eat for those suffering from a chronic eating disorder, is a very human but in the long run devastating malaise.
© Filippo Romano, 'Common Ground', from the series 'Nairobi'
© Filippo Romano, 'Common Ground', from the series 'Nairobi'
© Filippo Romano, 'Common Ground', from the series 'Nairobi'
His projects are independent stories, the result of an intense and sometimes obsessive relationship that he says he establishes with people and places and which often last a long time, perhaps too long. «Like certain films of the past that had the third time», but perhaps it is precisely the temporal drift that makes photography seem to him a rather unique tool of storytelling, like writing, can exist in a natural way, as a single story, or sedimentation of stories. «It can exist in incompleteness and have a sense and a meaning that goes beyond the intentions of the beginning of the departure.» I ask him at this point about Nairobi, a project awarded by the 2019 edition of Urbanautica. In reality, calling it a project is a bit simplistic. Nairobi is a project that began in 2011 after the first trip made together with the NGO Live in Slums, an organization that carries out architectural projects in the ghetto. After documenting the construction of a school in the poorest ghetto, Filippo started a large-scale project trying to analyze the whole area. Its dynamics, how it is inhabited, its geography, up to telling the whole city to try to clarify the fact that the slums in African cities are a necessary lung for the well-being of the so-called formal city. "But at the base of it all, I love the stories of the Nairobi people." he then adds. «To understand how ghettos belong to the African city, just take a street corner around the Down Town of Nairobi from six in the morning onwards to see a river of people from Mathare and Kibera the city to work, often on foot to save money on transportation. That river of people walking is everywhere in Africa and is one of the emblems of urban Africa in general.»
© Filippo Romano, 'Nomadic Seller', from the series 'Nairobi'
© Filippo Romano, 'Nomadic Seller', from the series 'Nairobi'
© Filippo Romano, 'Nomadic Seller', from the series 'Nairobi'
Filippo starts from the idea that a ghetto is a social system e from the fact that misery is a state of affairs and not much else. He explains to me that it is interesting to tell the complexity of survival. In his opinion, the ghetto is a mirror system to that of the formal city, offering the same services of the well-off city at an elementary level. "In Mathare, you can give birth with a midwife, and you can find a coffin as well. The difference is in the crude frugality and perhaps also the quality of the service you receive. Still, when you are a citizen who does not even have a street address, you live on a little more than a dollar per day. Maybe you don't even have the documents when you are an alien to the state to which you belong by right, in this case, a ghetto is a place that protects you in its hardness and guarantees you to survive". I understand that ghettos and their illegality temporarily tolerated is for Filippo the representation of the law/justice dichotomy in the urban landscape, I think it is erroneous and demagogic to use them together.
© Filippo Romano, 'Residents Welfare', from the series 'Nairobi'
© Filippo Romano, 'Residents Welfare', from the series 'Nairobi'
© Filippo Romano, 'Residents Welfare', from the series 'Nairobi'
© Filippo Romano, 'Residents Welfare', from the series 'Nairobi'
Filippo is still right when he tells me that if we look at ghettos with the eyes of the legislator, we horrify and judge them for their most apparent evidence, but if we suspend judgment and try to understand and listen, then we discover a complex world. Here this need not to reduce complexity is a key to reading his research that starts from the suspension of all judgments, in the pure curiosity of listening. I realize that the word "listen" often returns to Filippo's thinking, as if the people of Mathare were actually guiding him through their stories.
© Filippo Romano, 'Iron sheet - iron shape', from the series 'Nairobi'
© Filippo Romano, 'Iron sheet - iron shape', from the series 'Nairobi'
© Filippo Romano, 'Iron sheet - iron shape', from the series 'Nairobi'
He tells me about the work carried out, thanks to Gabriel Adigo, the first great narrator of Mathare, on the clandestine distilleries of the ghetto, which are nevertheless a source of sustenance. He then photographed the large Dandora landfill and entered it several times before the local police intercepted him and prohibited future access. With a Fuji Istanx, he portrayed the boys who go from the ghetto to clubs in Nairobi's center (making them sign the photos and giving them a digital file). Portraits that show a sense of belonging through style and elegance and a way of dressing testify a mix of behaviors and cultures generated in a ghetto. The club is the theater where to show and show yourself. Filippo also talked about the Nairobi of the Gated communities and their housing typologies. In short, Filippo's is a great puzzle, challenging to summarize, perhaps infinite, as he seeks a convincing pretext to reveal Nairobi's identities.
© Filippo Romano, 'Ghetto Clubbing', from the series 'Nairobi'
© Filippo Romano, 'Ghetto Clubbing', from the series 'Nairobi'
© Filippo Romano, 'Ghetto Clubbing', from the series 'Nairobi'
He does not have precise ideas on what Nairobi should do to improve; however, he thinks it is wrong to import Chinese or American models of urban development uncritically following a vision of growth that denies listening to communities that live in the city. «Its fragile complexity arises from the dilapidation of its administrative and political system. It is not enough to prohibit the use of plastic bags when there are far more serious emergencies of all kinds, and it is not enough, especially when a liter of water still costs more in the slums than in the rich areas of the city.» Then I discover that in Nairobi, in an area that is less and less peripheral, there is a place called Dandora. It's a sea of garbage and an open-air business. The landfill and decades of waste in the city seem to hold toxic treasures of all kinds, but it is taboo. The big problem is and remains the weak and corrupt political class, insists Filippo, and adds. «I met women who separated paper or glass from the rest of the garbage with their hands, in that tenacity I recognize the only possible redemption, the one that at every political election becomes real exasperation and violent clashes in the streets.»
© Filippo Romano, 'Dandora', from the series 'Nairobi'
© Filippo Romano, 'Dandora', from the series 'Nairobi'
© Filippo Romano, 'Dandora', from the series 'Nairobi'
I thank Filippo and ask him if he also believes that photography is dead. He tells me it reminds him a little of the eighties when people said that rock was dead. Perhaps digital has distorted the plans but photography remains a great personal exercise of freedom. And the photographer can therefore still either point his camera at random or try to give dignity to some people and their stories.
© Filippo Romano in Nairobi
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Filippo Romano (website)
Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019 (archive)
Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019 (catalog)
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