This photographic project is the starting point of my thesis that I am developing now. The concept for this project started from this quote: “Becoming who you are as you want to be”. This phrase since the beginning of our lives has been continuously repeated to us in the form of a mantra. But growing, little by little, each of us has realised how much in reality, this well-known quote has slowly and inevitably turned into an illusory condition in which we would like to be, but we cannot always. Moral values, norms, laws and social conventions lead each of us to feel either more or less limited in our own expression and being. We are all led to a sort of adaptation to what society dictates to us as normality. Pirandello, through his writings, expressed this condition by developing the theory of masks: a paradoxical and contradictory condition of every man as a prisoner of the "social" masks that cover one’s true self. Starting from this reflection, I started to evaluate how many of us are partly manipulated by what society expects and how we, frightened by the sense of rejection and inadequacy, change ourselves and manipulate our identity to avoid what can be defined as social segregation. In a society where racial hatred, homophobia, patriarchal heterosexual norms and unperturbed chauvinism still dominate, it is difficult to understand how much each identity is free to express itself or how much it is led to hide. In all this storm of hatred, violence and segregation, my thesis wants to analyse, study and understand, how the various identities of groups that suffer of social discrimination are changing and how — if it is really like that — the diversity of many can rise in this marasmus and stand proud of their fragility and differences."
The photos are a self-portrait realised through the technique of the double exposure (did directly in the camera without post-production) that start to put in discussion my appearance, my masks and feelings that I could showed and in consequence my identity and my state of mind.