freewater

Freewater

During my stay in Niger, among the immobile sands of the Hamdallaye refugee camp, I
conducted a theater and photography workshop as psychological support for women
and young girls recently evacuated from Libyan prisons. From that encounter, the
embryo of the Freewater project took shape—a journey suspended between the visible
and the invisible, seeking identities to be reinhabited and scars to be redeemed.
Acting, as a mirror of being, led each individual back to their inner roots, as if the body
could rediscover the lost thread of its unity. Only afterwards did the eye of the camera
come into play—not to immortalize an irretrievable past, but to embrace change. In the
collective creation of tableau vivants, each person rediscovered, with wonder, that
through the play of representation, pain was transfigured into uniqueness.
Upon my return to Italy, I encountered the women of the Somali community in Turin.
Five years of profound exchange transformed the initial seedlings into a tree: the
Freewater project blossomed, a visual hymn to the rebellion of bodies and the conflict
of the soul. Each image serves as a testament to the urgency of asserting an essential
freedom—a freedom that is not merely an escape from oppression, but also a
reclamation of one’s inner space.
This journey is not just a cultural voyage, but a spiritual transformation, where change
i s not a violent rupture, but a silent fermentation, like water bubbling before it
evaporates and becomes air. Freewater is a collective breath, an incessant floating
toward the possibility of being, beyond every imposed boundary.