VULNERA
For the first time in my life, in late 2016 I experienced a significant failure of my own body. Surgery followed in 2018, but unfortunately my body didn't respond well. Despite not being a life threatening condition, it left me learning to cope with a new series of physical limitations and recurring pain I have never been used to.
Looking for relief, in summer 2019 I reached the old mountain village of my youth, in Northern Italy, but the situation didn't get any better.
The few moments of relative well being I had left were during the night, so I started wandering the familiar woods of my teenage years after sunset, alone. What I didn't know was that, at the same time that my body began failing me, climate change struck those woods: a rapid succession of cold winters and unusually hot summers crippled the trees, weakening their bodies to the point of breaking under their own weight.
Finding those wooden corpses silently lying in the dark overwhelmed me: in a single moment I was acknowledging the vulnerability of my body, the vulnerability of the woods I had always deemed eternal since I was a little kid and, by extension, the vulnerability of the ecosystem. The whole planet suddenly appeared frail and ephemeral, in need of help.
I kept coming back to the woods. Night after night I extended the range of my walks, finding new trees and a deeper emotional involvement. Slowly, I began to realize that the pain of witnessing the broken trees was leading me on a path of acceptance of my own condition.
So I started documenting it.
