They Were Celebration Days

2002 - 2003 (selected in 2020)

24x36mm, 24x54mm, 6x6cm black and white negative film

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Seventeen years, only seventeen: a blow, an abyss. The rite of the popular feast lived so many times, the shared rite where all of us met again, even the ones who came from a distance, the ones who had forgotten the language. Only seventeen years and many beloved faces in these pictures passed away, the beloved ones we wanted to share them with left us, the children are now women and men. The rite of the Feast repeats every year, shared on social media with the fading photographs of the past, taken from old family albums, and the sparkling recent ones: the solemnity of the religious procession, the euphoria of the medieval joust. The rite keeps happening according to the plot, the roles and the lines we all want to listen to again. From centuries, from one hundred years, from fifty, from seventeen years: always the same, but – now I understand– so different.