In the Rom Camp

Rom Camp. Rome – 28 March 2017

"Photography, like all things, is always a matter of points of view, of how you decide to tell things.

For the first time in my life, I entered a Rom camp in Rome, twice in a row.

I have been wanting to visit one from the inside for years; if I had to say why I would have to answer that I feel a closeness with the people who live there, the same feeling I feel when I go to the villages of Indonesia, or to the slums of Jakarta. Going to the heart of this feeling, I think it's a desire to seek beauty and goodness where it is difficult to see them.

I don't hide the fact that when I first entered this camp my heart was beating fast and the senses were alerted to the maximum, but at the bottom, there was always the obstinacy to smile, to caress the children, to greet even the people who look at you badly: I mistrust them and they mistrust me, this is difficult to remove – but why?

There is evil and good in every place, as well as light and darkness in every person, inside me in the first place. So, let's throw ourselves without a net in search of beauty and light. And so that they open the door to your house, they tell you about a son who has disappeared in his homeland for twenty years, the boys tell you that they would like to get away from these camps that are dirty prisons. Women tell you to be careful because there are bad people, and they don't want anyone to hurt me; we smile.

I didn't go to do a long reportage, I just accompanied a photographer friend who came from afar for her project, and I didn't photograph those who didn't want to. I have only a few photographs with me, postcards from a dirty, seedy place, and I don't even want to say where because the place is not important, but that people with a heart and humanity live there. Like me, like you.

 

Absolutely nothing different, which is what I learned in Indonesia: being dirty does not mean being bad, and it is too easy to hide from the eyes what bothers to see and disturbs the normality of our lives.

But they are like us, they are one big smile that starts from Rome and reaches the sewer-free slums of Jakarta. But that's the same in every dark corner of the world; it is there that we must bring the light of our cameras.

Heartfelt thanks for opening your doors to me and to the photographers who accompanied me. Thanks to Adriana, Ruti, Adamo and Alessandro.

Always believe in people. At least give them a chance.”

This is what I wrote back in 2017. Since then, I have never had the opportunity to enter a Rom camp, but in February 2020 I entered the huge one of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

The feeling that remains is always the same.

Which is a typical psychological practice of the human being, that of hiding what is not pleasant to see. Only the profound oriental culture knows how to appreciate the beauty of imperfection.

Since apartheid in South Africa in the 1950s, the practice of separation/segregation has been a constant that spans decades and continents.

This goes from the micro to the macrocosm of human beings: psychoanalysis teaches us how we too, in our individual, isolate in the unconscious – trying to ignore and reject it – what frightens us and causes repulsion of our soul.

Gipsy camps, like any ghetto, are “neuroses” of society.

Perversions.

And, as dear Freud wrote, the only way to defeat our neuroses is to know them, to give them a name.

 

For this reason, I am pleased to re-propose these simple photographs after many years.

It's nice to see smiles in the dirt.

It would be better, then, if that dirt was not there...

 

Italian version