2018 Nikon-NOOR Academy Italy

Between November 12 to November 16, 2018, the Nikon-NOOR Academy held the second session of its Masterclass at Nikon Italy's headquarter. This masterclass launched the second session of the Nikon-NOOR Academy in 2018, which was later held in Hungary and Switzerland. Fifteen young visual storytellers gathered for an inspiring four days of learning and sharing with NOOR photographers Francesco Zizola, Sanne De Wilde and Benedicte Kurzen. The masterclass was moderated by NOOR Managing Director Clement Saccomani.

During these intensive days, the group reviewed and shared their portfolios, listened to presentations by the photographers, held in-depth discussions on practical and creative issues, and edited their visual stories. Below you will find a showcase of the participants’ work.

The masterclass has been made possible thanks to the generous support of Nikon Europe.

Alessia Rollo

Ambaradam

Ambaradam is a word Italian people use to define a messy situation or a confusing group of elements. A few months ago, I discovered that Ambaradam is the name of an Ethiopian mountain, the location of one of the bigger battles between Italy and Ethiopia in 1935. After this event, the United Nations imposed an embargo on Italy. There was no iron for the buildings, so we ended up with neo-classic architecture, using big stones for the buildings. And finally, a part of my family spent 10 years in Gimma, close to Addis Ababa in 1950, I could not understand why they had lived there. I only managed to get a few pictures and confused memories by my grandmother.

Starting from these accidental discovers and coincidences, I decided to start a project that questions the idea of a document itself: documents are the result of the effort made by a historical society to impose, either voluntary or involuntary, a certain image of themselves into the future. There is no truthful document. Every document is arbitrary. Every document is a lie. So I’ve decide to build up my own history about Italy, Ethiopia and the relationship between them.

Alessia Rollo

Alessia Rollo was born in South Italy in 1982. She received her BA at The University in Perugia and she is crossing her MA in Publishing at University Statale in Milan. She also obtained a Master in “Creative Photography” in 2009 at EFTI school in Madrid and participated on many workshops with international artists such as Peter Funch, Mauricio Alejo, Danis Darzacq, Jill Greenberg, Matt Siber, James Casebere and Mary Hellen Mark. She participated in solo and group exhibitions in Spain, Italy and Brazil. Her work has been displayed in Photolondon, Mia Photo Fair Milano, Urban Layers Triennale di Milano; Set up Bologna, Galleria Bluorg Bari; Bitume Photofest Malaga, Salonicco and Lecce: Milano, Biennale of Young Mediterranean artists; Galleria ARTcore Gallery Bari: Museum of history of Lecce; “Si fest off” Savignano: Galeria Mascate, Brasil; Galeria Cero Madrid; “Shangai Photofestival”, Shangai. She was selected for the international art residency Default – Masterclass in residence in 2011, for a residency at the MO.ta in Ljubljana in 2013, for the Biennale of Young Artists of the Mediterranean in 2015 and for “Bitume Photofest” in 2016 (Malaga, Thessaloniki, Lecce). Her project Fata Morgana has been selected in the finalist group for LensCulture Exposure Award 2018 and exhibited during Photo London 2018: she was selected by PHotoEspaña as emergent talent 2018 for Futures Photography. Her project “Dialoghi italiani” is one of the finalist works at Cormos Book Award 2018 at Arles. She was awarded by Fotocanal 2018 for her project “Fata Morgana” that will be published by Ediciones Anomalas in March 2018.

Camilla Ferrari

Aquarium

I landed in Beijing on the 23rd of August 2017. When I took my first steps in the Forbidden City all I could see was a blurred image of something I remembered from looking at photographs, books and online. For the first time, despite being an experienced traveller, I faced a severe panic attack. At first, the sound of hands moving the ladies’ bathroom curtains was so loud that it was disturbing. And so was the noise coming out of the karaoke bars during the night and the chitchat of people walking on the sidewalk. Sometimes you observe and sometimes you’re being observed. It’s almost like seeing through a glass that distorts what your eyes see, that makes the light flicker in front of you second after second and inserts you in a completely different world. And suddenly you are on the other side of that glass. You cannot hear what others say but you can feel the sweet cuddle of the water that surrounds you. And then, before I knew it, that sound of hands moving the bathroom curtains became a lullaby. The noise of the karaoke bars turned into music and the chitchat evolved into rhythm. Everything became gentle, even the unknown. Aquarium is the result of a quiet abandonment to diversity.

Camilla Ferrari

Camilla Ferrari (1992) is an Italian visual storyteller based in Milan. Her interest lies in the relationship between human beings and their surroundings, which she explores with a delicate voyeurism. Part of her research is concerned with how social media have the power to enrich visual storytelling through the mix between short videos and photographs. Perpetuating the sense of gentleness that arises from her photographs, she also expresses her delicate observations through her Instagram stories as an active part of her practice.

Camilla Piana

The roots are oriented towards water

“The roots are oriented towards the water” is the story of a place kissed by a river and moved by the hum of the forest. It is a story of melancholy and tenderness, of landscapes and inner looks. A picture of vivid details placed in a frame that moves between the lightness of everyday life and the weight of memory. A self-portrait, whose roots are born from the river and then move along its banks through the lives of those who live there and the landscape that lives around. Inside there are the seasons, the harvests, the scent of bread on Sunday mornings, the wine, country figures, the scent of freshly cut wood, the earth under the fingers, the turnips and flowers, the song of cicadas and silence of the hearth, the folly of the province and the wisdom of the simple. This is the story of how my eyes still want to see the enchantment that, since I was a child, binds me to this little corner of the world, where the purity of water and the greatness of the evening still exist. This is my invisible city. My country without a name. My roots. My personal way of dreaming again, of still laughing, of crying again, to say fuck off to death and forgetfulness. I lost my father a year ago and this is my way of staying with him again among the tomatoes of his vegetable garden.

Camilla Piana

Camilla Piana is born in Autumn, on 1988, in a small town on the hill side of Italy. From 2014, she documentary fine art photographer and visual artist. Through a cinematographic and contemplative vision of landscape and portraiture, her research is focused on the relationship between dream and reality, truth and comedy, realism and fantasy, documentary and poetry. Now she is working on two long-term projects, one in Africa, one in Italy, in her country of origin: both revolve around the concept of loss. Currently she lives and works in Milan, Italy.

Camillo Pasquarelli

Endless Winter

The valley of Kashmir has been a contested land between India and Pakistan since 1947 and one of the most militarised zones in the world. Since 1989, when a Kashmiri armed insurgency was bloodily suppressed, this region witnessed various political turmoils against the Indian administration, and the situation has never really changed. The starting of a new season of protests, repression and martyrs is always unpredictable. Disillusionment is in the air; new tombstones fill the graveyards and a new generation is ready to sacrifice their life for a new armed insurgency. A visual journey through the struggle of the Kashmiri people, trapped in an endless winter of suffering whilst hoping for a spring of azadi (meaning "freedom" in Urdu language). The valley and its people are stuck in a temporal limbo, a continuous cycle in which time has lost its ability to affect history. With this project, I seek to reflect on the notion and the experience of conflict, memory, islamic religion in a highly politicised geographical area. Through an intimate and personal approach, I aim to question and challenge the classic “news perspective” to conflict zones in a way that raise emotions and atmospheres rather than show facts and provide informations.

Camillo Pasquarelli

Camillo (1988) is an italian photographer based in Rome. Only after completing his studies in political science and anthropology, he decided to devote himself entirely to photography. Nowadays, he is mostly interested in personal and long-term projects, and deals with documentary photography through the combination of the anthropological approach and the photographic medium. Since 2015 he has been working on a visual project about the valley of Kashmir, India, exploring the notion and the experience of conflict, memory, religion and political aspirations. In 2017 he received one of the Alexia Foundation Student Grant to keep working on “Endless winter." His works have been published on Time, Der Spiegel, BuzzFeed, Internazionale, Mashable, Il Reportage, Gazeta Wyborcza, Il Manifesto, Left, among others. He was part of exhibitions in Russia, Italy, Spain, India, Israel, Lithuania, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates.

Elias Holzknecht

New Alpine Landscapes

It’s in December when the high season of the skiing regions in North- and Southern- Tyrol, Austria starts. The ski lifts slowly start to rattle, hotels activate their air freshener and cars block the narrow streets of the Alpine valleys. It’s the season where tourists come and go without a brake until the end of March. Everything is ready and well prepared. It’s just the lack of snow that interferes with the seemingly perfect winter wonderland. But that doesn’t matter as the snow guns can do the job just perfectly fine. Ever since the winter temperatures have been rising in the alpine regions, the ski industry had to find its ways to make up for the arising lack of snow. They developed technologies to produce artificial snow and by that invented a new, a better nature. This project describes the relationship between human mankind and nature in an age of climate change on the micro perspective of emerging new alpine landscapes.

Elias Holzknecht

Elias Holzknecht is a freelance photographer based between Hannover (Germany) and Innsbruck (Austria). Studying Documentary- and Reportage-Photography in Hannover, he is interested in social and geopolitical issues.

Elisabetta Zavoli

The Velvet Butterfly

“The velvet butterfly” is a body of work about my 6 years documentation of the waria community in Jakarta, Indonesia. Waria is an umbrella word for transgender and transvestite people, coming from the merging of wanita (woman) and pria (man). My vision changed over the course of the years as changed my perception and understanding of waria people. The very first day I met Mami Yuli, the leader of the community, I felt repulsed. I was ashamed of myself for having had this feeling but I wasn’t able to codify her and that was destabilizing. I felt confused. I felt puzzled. I felt uncomfortable. But I was curious. I felt intrigued by her diversity. I’ve got obsessed by her nature and I started to dream about her transformation. She took me on a journey inside the waria community and I took a journey inside me. That is why my personal experience had to be part of this narrative. Visually, I’ve edited on a purple background the staged pictures because this is the colour that comes to my mind when thinking of velvet.

Elisabetta Zavoli

I’m a documentary photographer born in Rimini (Italy) in 1976. I graduated in Environmental Sciences at University of Bologna in 2001 and in 2009 I got a Master in Photojournalism at Contrasto Agency in Milan. In the same year, I moved to Algiers where I’ve been documenting the condition of women in Algerian society. Since 2012, I have been based in Jakarta working as a free-lance photographer on assignments and on personal long term documentary projects regarding environmental issues and gender issues. My project documenting the depletion of mangroves ecosystem in Indonesia has been awarded, in 2016, Journalism Grant for Innovation in Development Reporting by European Journalism Centre. My photos, videos and articles have been published on major international media and press agencies. So far, my photographic work has been shown in 19 exhibitions, both solo and collective, in 9 countries all over the world.

Emilienne Malfatto

The Girls

This is the story of Fatma and Tiktum. Two sisters, aged 6 and 8 years old, they live in Chibayish, in Southern Iraq, an extremely conservative Shiite region. It’s the story of their daily life in that particular environment. It’s an intimate story about childhood and about this magic they seem to conceal and reveal in every situation. It’s also a story about girls’ condition in Iraq – where lawmakers have proposed a law to legalize marriage for girls as young as 9 years-old. Only a year older than Fatma. Therefore, the project is called The Girls, because it can be the story of every Iraqi girl. For now, Fatma and Tiktum are completely free. Life is all about amusement. But this will change at some point - as soon as they become teenagers, they will have to cover up and "behave." This is a personal, long-term project that I intend to pursue in the future. In Chibayish, at some point, a girl cannot be photographed anymore, for “honor” reasons. I have no idea when exactly this turning point will happen, but I hope Fatma, Tiktum and I will find creative solutions to continue this project anyway.

Emilienne Malfatto

Emilienne Malfatto is a documentary photographer & photojournalist working mostly in Iraq. She studied political and social sciences in France and Colombia and she graduated from Sciences Po Paris school of journalism. She then worked 18 months for the AFP in France and in the Middle East. She works as a freelancer since 2015, mostly in Iraq, with occasional reporting elsewhere. She is interested in post-conflict and conflict-adjacent issues, and she likes to find different, intimate ways to tell personal yet important stories.

Francesca Volpi

DARWIN

In Honduras having a different kind of sexual orientation or gender identity exposes people to danger discrimination. However the country has not specific law against homosexuality, this condition of vulnerability is worsened by the context of general violence in Honduras, a country where 92% of killings get unpunished. In 2017, there have been 34 murders of LGBT community members in Honduras, according to the observatory on violent deaths of the organization Cattrachas. One of those people was Marco Tullio Montoya who was kidnapped, tortured and killed in April 2017, his body had signs of torture and was set ablaze alive according to the forensic exams. The story focuses on his brother Darwin, 23 years old, also gay, and his life and how it’s been affected after his loss. For him, Marco wasn’t only brother but a guide and best friend, in a context where loneliness and exclusion is common amongst young LGBT people. More than one year later, Marco’s murder remains unpunished and Darwin has been threatened by the same gang and was forced to flee the country seeking asylum in Europe. The reportage, aims to be a way into the LGBT community as part of bigger project about Honduras and the various reasons that move people to flee and try to build their lives somewhere else.

Francesca Volpi

I was born in 1985 in Italy. I am a freelance independent photographer working professionally since 2013. I handled assignments for various publications and worked on projects in collaboration with NGO’s. I am interested in the human beings and with my work I try to tell character-driven stories, dissecting how war, urban conflicts, climate change and poverty affect lives of people across the globe. Photography and Video are my medium of choice. In recent years my work has focused on the impact of the ongoing war in Ukraine, and stories of extraordinary people in Honduras, where I worked on LGBT issues, health system, environment defenders and climate change and internal migration. I graduated from the London College of Communication’s Journalism department and obtained a Master in Photojournalism from the Higher Institute of Photography and Integrated Communications (ISFCI) in Rome. I lived in London, Rome, Paris and Honduras for five months in 2017 – and worked in and reported from Ukraine, Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, the Balkans, Egypt and Honduras.

Giulia Frigieri

C'est Haram

C’est Haram is a photographic journey unfolding the reasons behind the annihilation of the ancient Berber tradition of facial tattooing. C’est Haram ( Haram is the Arabic word used by Muslims to express the idea of committing an act of sin against God ) is the answer that most of those women gave me when I asked them why was this tradition slowly vanishing and why young generation were denying and rejecting such cultural practice. Those women photographed, expressing different feelings towards their tattoos, are some of the last representatives of this tradition which is soon to be forgotten. My project seeks to understand and represents visually this shift in meaning, the reasons why this traditional tattoo has now become a shameful mark, a stigma, in conflict with the leading Arabic culture and the generational gap in perceiving the tattoo as a distinctive symbol of ethnic and cultural identity of a community.

Giulia Frigieri

Giulia Frigieri is a young Italian based young photojournalist and documentary photographer, focusing on themes such as Identity, female empowerment and inter-generational relationships in the Middle East and Mediterranean. Moving away from home at the age of 19, Giulia moved to London where she lived for over six years, graduating in Anthropology and Media at Goldsmiths University. Since then, a lot happened and everything changed. Her passion for portraits and storytelling blossomed alongside her anthropological studies and after a nomadic two years on a house boat on the canals of London and a bunch of internships in the British creative industry, Giulia took off to several global adventures that took her to live in Morocco for some time and to study storytelling and photojournalism at the acclaimed Danish School of Media and Journalism, in Aarhus, Denmark. Giulia published her first story “SURFING IRAN”, a reportage on the newborn Iranian surfing scene lead by a group of women on several magazines such as D la Repubblica (Italy), De Volkskrant (Netherlands), Vogue Arabia (Middle East) and Huck Magazine(UK). She’s now working on several projects around North Africa and in the Middle East.

Lucas Bäuml

political hectares

Extreme economic differences, racial thinking, uneven chances of education and work, as well as corruption split the South African society. Even 25 years after the end of Apartheid many major problems remain unsolved: The majority of black people lives in poverty. One of the biggest discussions - the land-debate. As a consequence of history the white minority (8,5%) owns 73% of the agriculturally used land. People demand a radical land-reform. Far-left political parties like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and Black Land First (BLF) demand expropriation of farmland without compensation. Attacks on farmers and their land occur. The white landowners feel threatened, isolate themselves, and radicalize. No one wants to compromise. Quite the opposite. Conflict between black and white is rising before the elections 2019.

Lucas Bäuml

Lucas Bäuml was born in 1997 in Bremen, Germany. Since 2016 he studies Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover, Germany. In 2018 he attended the NikonNOOR Masterclass in Turino.

Marco Tiberio

SATELLITES

Mass migration led to the creation of new residential areas. Although in Europe we still don’t realise it, because the cases are limited - Calais was the most striking example - and because we prefer forms of detention - rather than cohabitation - this doesn’t mean it is not happening in other parts of the world. Real cities have been shaped by decades of mass migration and the most clear examples of this phenomenon can be seen in Africa (especially Kenya, Chad and Western Sahara). Satellite imagery is the mean which help us to understand this evolution in the most consistent way. These satellite-cities, even if often are not considered as actual cities, develop as real urban conglomerates, in different ways according to their geographic position and the communities inhabiting them. The goal of “Satellites” is to analyse, through satellite imagery, these new cities, give them a visual dignity and investigate how they evolved, following the principles of town planning. In addition, we want to underline how public satellite imagery in Europe (e.g. Google Earth) shows no traces of these conglomerates, denoting a “censorship” which prevents a clear understanding of the matter. Exemplar is the situation of Calais, where public satellite imagery remained not updated between 2004 and 2015, even though refugee camps where clearly spreading around the town. I soon realised that public imagery wasn’t updated and showed no traces of the refugee camps that were established in that area during the years. It’s interesting to see, how on the other side, satellite imagery is used in the African refugee camps case also to keep tracks of their evolution. I decided to focus on Africa and some countries in particular, because it gave me at the same time more heterogeneity and unicity of images and results, and also because some cases offered more representatives images and more precise data. Each image is the result of the composition of hundreds HD screen- shots stitched together.

Marco Tiberio

Marco Tiberio (b. 1988) is a creative director and photographic artist based in Amsterdam. His main field of interest is how human beings react to the changes in society and how they interact with it and the world they live in, being it physical or not. He likes to challenge serious topics in an ironic manner, turn them around and take the viewer in an unexpected journey where classic photography, video, print and generative photography merges together. His goal is to find new ways of investigating topics in order to make them more accessible to a broader public and give them new interpretations. With art director Maria Ghetti, he founded a creative studio and publishing house called Defrost. Their first book “Immorefugee” was selected among the best photobooks of 2017 by Martin Parr. They just published the studio’s second publication, “Enlarge Magazine”, the first magazine about penis enlargement. Marco also teaches at the Academy of Architecture of Amsterdam.

Michele Spatari

Rising Water

Shared toilets on buildings’ balconies, overcrowded apartments, occupied factories, broken down RVs, social housing attendance lists, bailiffs and forced evictions. The most used word in Italy’s last public showers is as simple as, apparently, unattainable: home. House expenses account for 36% of the annual expenditure of Italian families. 32,069 evictions were executed in 2017, 2799 in Turin only: the highest rate among Italian cities, an average of 7 every day. To cope with its systemic housing crisis – exacerbated by the economic collapse of the 2000s – the city of Turin still runs 4 communal baths offering a basic service for those living in harsh housing conditions. It can be seen as an outdated memory of the past, but Public Baths hide stories of social cohesion and solidarity: since the beginning of the XX century, these public showers played a key role in mitigating the systemic housing crisis, worsened in the past years due to the Turin’s economic downfall. While being a needed service, the very existence of these public showers shows the breakdown of our society: the failure of the right to a decent accommodation.

Michele Spatari

Michele (b. 1991) is a news and documentary photographer based in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he mainly strings for AFP – Agence France-Presse. His photographic, journalistic and documentarian practice is focused on the study of bodies and space: how politics, religions and social rituals affect and shape contemporary cities and urban societies. In 2016 Michele graduated in Architecture and Urban Planning, developing a master thesis in Beirut, Lebanon. In 2017 he attended the ICP Masterclass Visual Storytelling and New Media; in 2018 completed a one-year program in Photojournalism at ISFCI in Rome, Italy; he has been selected for the Nikon-NOOR Academy Italy and for the Canon Student Program at Visa Pour l’Image, Perpignan. His project about public showers and housing crisis in Turin won the Canon Italy Young Photographer Award - Multimedia and has been exhibited at Cortona On The Move Festival. His work appeared on international media such as The New York Times, Time, Le Monde, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, El Pais, La Repubblica, Bloomberg, Vice, L'Espresso, Internazionale, and others.

Stefano Sbrulli

EL PLOMO DENTRO

Cerro de Pasco is the highest city in the world at almost 4,500 meters high. Over the years the city has developed around the open-cast mine called “El Tajo” (the Cut), a 2 km long and over 900 meters deep crater, from which lead, copper, zinc, gold and silver are extracted. The extraction of minerals is accompanied by the emission of heavy metals that contaminate the water and the surrounding area, causing a strong impact on the health of the population.

Hair analysis performed by Source International has shown that the average concentration of lead in the hair of children in Cerro de Pasco is 36 times higher than the international reference standards. This is a result of the high concentration of heavy metals in the body 100% of the population should be hospitalized urgently.

Today the panorama of Cerro de Pasco is a continuous alternation of crumbling buildings and mountains of waste rocks from which toxic powders rise and from which acidic water emerges. The only solution that has been proposed to date by the Peruvian government is a forced displacement of 80,000 inhabitants in another area of the Pasco region.

Stefano Sbrulli

Stefano Sbrulli (1988) graduated in Digital and Virtual Design at the European Institute of design of Rome in 2010. Between 2011 and 2017 he attended a masters in computer graphics and journalism to tell stories combining graphics and photography/video. In 2015 he started working as a freelance photographer and videomaker and his work has appeared on national and international media outlets including the BBC, Correio Brazielinse, E-Novine, Internazionale, TPI, Huffington Post, La Repubblica, Nat Geo and others. He is currently visual artist in television productions RAI and La7 and a visual journalist in multimedia projects mainly concerning the relationship between man and the environment in which he lives.

Tomaso Clavarino

PADAN(I)A SUPERIORE

“Padan(I)a Superiore” is a visual survey of the territory along the former SS11 Padana Superiore road, that links Turin to Venice, across Northern Italy. An analysis of the urban space, its margins, the environment and places where people live and move. And on the road project that wants to be a sort of mapping of a part of Northern Italy that seems to live in a limbo, between the memory of an industrial past and a future full of uncertainties. A visual story on the complex relationship between landscape and human presence, on the inevitable changes in the geography and identity of these places. A somehow both sad and ironic vision of the northern Italian province, on its marginsm, its contradictions and suspension in time. A journey started in 2016 and not yet completed.

Tomaso Clavarino

I’m an Italian documentary photographer born in 1986 with an MA in Contemporary History. Since 2014 my work has been published by several newspapers, magazines and media outlets such as Newsweek, The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, VICE, Huck Magazine, Courrier, International, etc… In parallel with my work for media outlets I also pursue more personal and long term projects. My works have been exhibited and screened in several art galleries, festivals and public spaces, such as Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Athens Photo Festival, Photo Kathmandu, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Format Fes val in Derby, Obscura Fes val in Penang, Encontros da Imagem in Braga and so on. I am based in Torino, Italy.

Valeria Cherchi

Some of you killed Luisa

16th June 1992: The upper part of a human ear is found by a priest on a mountainous road in Barbagia, central Sardinia. A young boy, Farouk Kassam, is spending his fifth month in a hidden cave, held captive by a group of masked strangers. The balconies in my village are clad with white blankets, a symbol of solidarity with the mutilated, kidnapped boy. We are about the same age, just six years old. Like most kids, I am also terrified of being taken away from my home. Eleven years later, Luisa Manfredi was shot dead on the balcony of her home. She was 14 years old and the daughter of Matteo Boe, Farouk’s kidnapper. No-one was ever charged or convicted for her murder, which remains a mystery till this day. In all 162 people were kidnapped for ransom in Sardinia between 1960 and 1997. The Sardinian bandits, known as ‘Anonima sequestri sarda,’ followed a set of unwritten rules called Il Codice barbaricino (The Barbagian code). Where the power of the state falls short, a rough justice-in-parallel served through the code, preserved the honour and the dignity of the individual. This project is an attempt to decode the complex structure of the Sardinian kidnapping phenomenon. It starts with a personal research of the small and closed communities of the island, weighed down by a past of isolation and colonisation. It then progresses to an individual level, reflecting over the desperation of two mothers: one unable to control the fate of her young kidnapped son, and the other unable to find justice for her murdered daughter. The story is told through screenshots from family videos and from news broadcasts related to kidnapping cases. It also includes my own photographs from the research process in Barbagia, as well as photographs inspired by the memories and stories of the kidnapped. Finally, there is a written account of my investigation, including my struggle to break through the wall of silence caused by the ever-present law of omertà.

Valeria Cherchi

Valeria Cherchi (1986) is an Italian photographer. She was born and raised in Sardinia, Italy. Her practice focuses on projects regarding social and cultural issues. Her research is driven by the need of exploring topics such as time, memories and history connected to her personal experience. She is interested in true and tangible character-driven stories, often told by combining photography and text. In 2018 Valeria is named as 'One to Watch' by The British Journal of Photography.