Beehives (in progress)
I have always been fascinated, since I was a kid, by the trenches.
I did not immediately listen to this "love", but with the passing of the years and with my move from Rome to London something changed. The first times in the new city were difficult, I did not speak the language, little money and I did not have a job; all these conditions led me to live in the suburbs, learning to know them, appreciating some aspects, and making them seem normal places, which, from the stories told, were anything but normal.
I remember the first 6 to 8 months, I spent most of my days off, alone, walking miles to the most and less famous places in the city. Yes Tower Bridge and Tower Hill, ok the City, beautiful the Big Ben and the London Eye, but what really continued to amaze me and to impress me was not the speed with which paper skyscrapers rose, but it was the old London, still possible to smell and observe through the old docks and the everywhere council houses built after World War II to make up for the lack of housing. And the latter, which I will call trenches, are the main characters of this project/series called "Beehives".
Do you know a beehive? Here it is! The trenches remind me exactly the hives and their inhabitants, the bees.
Hundreds of apartments concentrated in a few hectares, in most cases developed in height.Huge grey blocks full of sad eyes; cold and frightening not only on black sky days and rainy winter nights but also on sunny spring days. Places, at first glance, devoid of feelings.
Why do they scare us? What really scares us about them? Frightened by their inhabitants and that they can sting us like bees just because we are strangers? Maybe the stories that are told about it? Or maybe all that rough and colourless concrete dries up our hearts? Well, I have no answers to these questions because I am one of the few, I think, attracted by these megaliths and what they hide. I am one of the few who is truly attracted to them and all the hidden treasures they hold and thus I have to apologise but I don't have the answers to all those questions.
Inside what looks like cold and impenetrable armour from the outside, we find an unexpected world, a world easily comparable to a beehive where everyone knows each other, where a community exists, where one is still a family, where one unites in difficulties, and where everyone seeks, in his own way, a bright future. To the outside world, they are born already marked, in some cases born already surrendered or simply forced to a no man's land where you can taste the reality of a wrongly designed system.
In addition to loving the aesthetic of the trenches, so how they appear to the naked eye, I also love to photograph them, as if they were the subjects of a portrait; lately, more than ever I want memories of what in a near future will no longer exist due to area gentrification. Above all, to embrace the respect and the hospitality that I have always received from those who make them alive by living in these magnificent buildings.
The best flowers are born from concrete.
