Boys Will Be Boys

- on going -

I was born male, white and Western.
It is a lottery win belonging to the most privileged category in human history.

However, Desire / Fear, Attraction / Repulsion are the contrasting forces on which my relationship with “virility” has always been based.
In a complex game of power and subjection, from the moment of his birth each male has to deal with the norms, rules and corollaries which define and constitute the dominant male identity of his own society, and after he has to decide whether to adapt or escape from them.
Starting from an individual perception, which doesn’t aim to represent the new possible forms of contemporary alternative masculinity, Boys will be Boys is a visual dreamlike narration of forces clash, and of the complicated relationship between man and manhood within Western society.

LIQUIDO

Water Dreams of Itself

The concept of identity, like that of reality itself, has become amorphous and multiplicitous. The result is a fluxing world in which fixity has been replaced by the potential for a range of shifting forms. In an individualistic culture, we can assemble and deconstruct ourselves at will, with the strict bonds of old giving way to a liquid instability.

Contemporary Western societies are increasingly fragile constructions. Individuals, no longer tethered to strict cultural templates, are free to cycle through evolving permutations. The individual becomes an aqueous entity, taking shape only to flow into and through itself in search of organic contours. The self remains a container, but a malleable and permeable one. Identity courses everywhere, pools nowhere.

WAITHOOD

Waithood, a portmanteau composed of “wait” and “adulthood”, is a period of stagnation in the lives of the youth, unemployed and newly graduated, in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA), India, etc. It can be described as “a kind of prolonged adolescence”, during which a large proportion of these guys spend its best years waiting.
Waiting for a job, waiting for economic independency, waiting for the decisive transition from adolescence to adulthood.

After the 2008 economic crisis, this term can be easily applied to the young europeans as well, who, after having ended their studies, start to wait, seek and hope.
The national borders do not exist anymore, it is way easier to travel, searching desperately somewhere else what you cannot find in your own country, in order to stop waiting.
It’s been a while since I have reached this life’s period and it is hard to see the end of it.

Trying to find a solution I’ve started to move myself, almost compulsively, between Portugal, Italy and United Kingdom, hoping to be fulfilled in one of these countries.
My generation grew up with the belief that everything it’s possible, but, finally, it finds itself alone and hopeless, with no inclination to compromise.
Escaping elsewhere seems one of the best reliefs, but it leads to more loneliness and indifference from the surrounding world.

MILANO MARE

MILANO MARE is a project focused on the depth of Milanese citizens’ connection to the water, dwelling on what I saw as a tendency toward “pretending to live in a seaside town.”

The project has been developed during Magnum Scholarship with Alex Majoli for the Milano PhotoWeek and exhibited at La Triennale Di Milano.