Thoughts of February

“How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a weary world.”
(William Shakespeare)

Dhaka, February 2020

Two years ago, around these days, I had just arrived in Dhaka.

For the first time, after ten years of chasing those colors in Rome, I was concretely immersed in that vortex of dust that was more alive than any Holi festival.

Maybe it's this grey morning that promises rain, maybe it's two years in which we don't know how to imagine any kind of future, that we are chained in our cities; it will be that every time a plane flies over my nose and a train shakes the ground under my feet, I feel melancholy; maybe it's hard to look for colors every morning as Cesare Pavese wrote when those colors are miles and miles away from us.

It will be this and many other things, but that trip came back to my mind, also because it was the last one before everything was closed.

I went back to see those photographs, hundreds and hundreds taken in a month, almost drinking from those crazy and pungent colors.

 

Dhaka, February 2020

I have a strange relationship, which I can't explain well even to myself, with those people. I stop to stare at these images stolen from a rickshaw, of these women and men who survive in the gray dust of all the same days, with tired faces weighed down by the hardness of a city that devours and spits you like red betel.

The same feeling I felt in Jakarta, Philippines, among the Rohingya in Malaysia.

Very often they tell me that I am emphatic, that wherever you put me I am fine, there is no distance between me and those people.

It is true. Every now and then, I try to ask myself why.

People don't understand that more than being a virtue, this is a pain for me. Sometimes my eyes get wet for no reason, like I'm one of them but I'm not – with mortification and guilt.

Maybe because my life went like this, I did a lot but achieved little, and if my parents hadn't been alive at this hour, I would be like them living under the bridge.

I am ontologically united with them. I feel what they feel, their pains, their tears. That's why I've never felt like a thief in photographing them, because I love them from the bottom of my heart.

I love the dignity of living trying to smile between the wrinkles of young women with faces as old as my grandmother if you smile at them.

 

Jakarta, November 2017

Wherever I went, they always told me I was like one of them.

Maybe that's why I can't get the melancholy off me this morning. I don't know when I will be able to return to visit those places, or if I will still be able. There is still so much to see out there.

I would like to get lost in the streets of Sri Lanka, Cambodia, India, Myanmar... Return once again to the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia.

My beloved Thailand, which I saw for just one day, like a mirage.

 

I would like to die like this, I don't care where but away from everything.

With eyes full of color. The feet dirty with earth.

In the mouth scattered fragments of shredded languages like spices on stone.

I would like to show everyone, through my photographs, that the task of each of us is to build bridges, as someone wrote – to make us close, even without being seen or interacting.

It is enough to be eyes full of love.

Here, I think that Photography must be in its highest mission: to love what it sees, what it captures, even if in the dark, in the dust, in the manure, among the mice.

I miss this tremendously.

 

If you can, wait for me...

 

Dhaka, February 2020

Italian version