- When I got to Rignano, the Ghetto residents told me: "You mustn't keep any trace of our lives here in these precarious houses. This despair is not yours to display." The misery in the Ghetto is the first thing that struck me, the first thing I wanted to show.
- Summer 2014. I'm leaving for the South of Italy as a photographer along with a group of actors : they're preparing a theatre play directed by Pietro Marullo, a young Italian artist seeking to explore the world of the African immigrants who have come all the way to Europe to do seasonal work. On the last day of our writing Residence, local NGO officials take us to Rignano, a small country village lying just handful of kilometres away from the town where I grew up: as the sun slowly sets on the horizon, we stumble upon a maze-like urban slum concealed in a small land depression where a community of around 3.000 African migrants live. Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso... all North-Western African countries are accounted for during the tomato harvest season. They call it the 'Ghetto', and it is nothing short of staggering: accompanied by NGO volunteers, we pass through a village made of wood and cardboard where everything seems transient. Fragile huts succeed one another following an urban layout of primitive geometry: we find restaurants, makeshift stores, brothels, a mosque... all of them crammed next to each other. Suddenly, the cries of joy of the Ghetto children who saw us coming from afar blend in with the changing colours of sundown. For a brief instant, I forget the misery of this forsaken place lost in the middle of nowhere, and all I can see is a beautiful secret that has long been kept silent and that has found a way to reveal itself at last. Why haven't I seen any pictures of this place before, when I had myself been living in Apulia until my 19th birthday? Straight away the answer is given to us by the couple of migrants we run into: most of them are aghast at the idea that their families might one day see the undignified conditions they are currently living in. Therefore, any reporter who attempts to enter the huts to take pictures is systematically shown the door. This vision has been haunting me ever since it came to me one afternoon under the suffocating southern Italian sun at the end of summer. In July 2015, I went back to the Ghetto on a whim with a camera and a Super8 video camera: I didn't know how much time I was going to stay but one thing I did know was that I absolutely had to keep a trace of the encounters I had over there. Bringing an image recording device into the Ghetto required creating an initial 'long-lasting' bond with the migrants so they might embrace my presence and my gaze. I ended up living in the slum and sharing every daily moment with its inhabitants for one and a half month: the endless days spent under the stifling heat, the many sleepless nights, the search for food and water, the cooking of the frugal meals, the trips to town... And for the first three weeks of my stay in the slum, lying in wait for a bond to emerge, I recorded nothing and took no pictures. The migrants and I eventually bonded over our shared anticipation. They were hoping for work to begin in the tomato fields; as for me, I was waiting for them to be comfortable enough to start shooting. When the workers saw how determined I was to stay with them despite the hardships, they finally understood that I wasn't just there to catch their misery. During those times when I had nothing to offer except my presence and my listening, something unexpected happened: some of the people I was spending time with spontaneously requested me to take photos of them. 'So you can show our photos to your brothers in Belgium'.
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