EPICENTER | Alzano Lombardo – Nembro | COVID – 19 | Portraits and emotions

“Fear and helplessness: the fear of getting sick and infecting my wife and daughter, and the helplessness of not knowing what to do, not having enough means to diagnose and treat.”

Dr. Massimiliano Bellisario

“Uncertainty. The impact of death. Ambulances and sirens on the streets. People in tears on the phone. Lost kids on video chats.
The collective mourning.
Redemption.
And a sense of redemption is also a shared need. We rise only together.”

Don Matteo Cella

“What are basic necessities? What do I need to live on? To live or to survive? Because I survive on food but I don’t live on food alone. It depends on the duration, like when you go underwater, at the beginning you are free as a dolphin, at the end you only need oxygen.”

Alessandro Travelli

“My mother-in-law’s illness, mutual isolation, sense of helplessness, loneliness and abandonment have carved deep wounds in me that make my heart bleed.”

Cristiana Ferraris

“In the suspended and unreal time of the lockdown we felt vulnerable and powerless. Perhaps, we reconsidered the value of affections, the very meaning of life.”

Felice Corna

“It was a very hard time, with my mom dying on March 12, my dad on March 15, and two of my children and my wife at home with a fever of 39. The thoughts in my mind, flowed fast and conflicting, going from the blackest pessimism to a healthy optimism; but these mood swings varied continuously from hour to hour, and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel seemed only a distant mirage.”

Maurizio Signori

“I had lost 9 out of 10 jobs and was spending time at home alone.
I read, studied, and meditated. I played and sang. I helped someone when I could. I experienced fear and cultivated faith.”

Marco Vecchi

“I am a nurse at Alzano Lombardo hospital. One day I struggle to breathe. Swab, pneumonia, CPAP.
The fear, the anguish.
It was the disease of loneliness.”

Catia Canonico

“What gives me a firm confidence, is the belief that this can be a time of deep encounter with ourselves, a time in which, in order to survive, it is necessary to learn to love ourselves.
I go from moments of deep despair, to others of depression and then peaks of joy and gratitude.”

Gloria Volpato – Psychologist

“Awareness, distress, fear.
A symphony of sirens at every hour of the day and night. The feeling was one of total abandonment, as if the house were a small island in the middle of a stormy sea.”

Daniele Gamba

“On March 10, I said goodbye to my mother for the last time.
I hope that this virus, which is yet another proof that there are no barriers, borders or walls, can really change radically the way we see the really important things in life, that the euphoria of having survived does not lead us to be the shits we were before.”

Angelo Gregis

“This sort of great fracture caused by the pandemic is working as an unveiling. Right and wrong no longer have the same contours, so do the tolerable and the intolerable.
Consciousness, for example, of the fact that we must preserve the other within a zone of regard and shelter. Which is the same zone of regard and shelter that we ask for ourselves, that we ourselves need.”

Prof. Ivo Lizzola

“The situation seems unreal: the streets almost deserted, the traffic absent, a strange silence interrupted at times by the siren of an ambulance that carries with it the anxiety and worry that fill our hearts in these weeks.
We need to find the strength to overcome the discouragement and to face the next days.”

Cancelli Claudio – Mayor of Nembro

“We felt the need for narratives and stories, to tell each other how we were, what we were living; we entered each other’s homes, we shared, even through screens, our spaces, our moments of uncertainty, of fear.”

Prof. Brunella Sarnataro

“I work in a funeral home. I’m used to death, but this time it was too much, even for me. it was a pain that has no answers.”

Vanda Piccioli

Websitemauriziomilesi.com/prodotto/epicentro/

EPICENTER | Alzano Lombardo - Nembro

Ranica, a small town near Alzano Lombardo.

May 2020. Recurring episodes of anxiety.

The situation outside is serious, my mind, inside, tired. It’s almost time to get out of the house-bubble imposed by the lockdown. It’s time to start living again, but this brings with it the assumption of previously much smaller risks.
At the age of 26, inebriated by my newfound freedom, I find myself caught between uncertainty about work, expenses, the financial support of my family and independence.
The fragility of loved ones. The fragility of those who, still extremely young, should not have to suffer. The fear of “bringing home” something. Something, this thing, this virus. The need to live again, to enjoy freedom, work, friendships.
With my economic independence lost, I feel the need to reset a path, to resume a direction, a desire for action, a need to do.

As a photographer, I follow many projects from my computer monitor. I know I’m one of the lucky ones not to be in the hospital, let alone ill, but I don’t feel represented, I feel that I’m not being talked about. In the media overexposure, nothing speaks of me, of my anxiety, of my muffled feeling, of my feeling helpless, lost. But I know I am not the only one.

My photographic research was born from these premises. My house is 500 meters from the border with Alzano Lombardo, I was born in the hospital “Pesenti Fenaroli”, I grew up here, and the distinction between countries is substantiated, in the concrete, in different days for the collection of garbage, and little other. I went to school in Ranica, but then friendships spread and went beyond the school days, and so Alzano and Nembro are not distant, distant towns, but they are always home, my home. Our home.

The project would like to tell about an issue that has often remained hidden, the emotional and psychological one, and would have the ambition to increase understanding. The understanding of each other, the “realization” that these emotions were far more common than we can think, and that these will certainly have a weight in the future, but if we share this weight with our community, at least we will know we are not alone, and we will not think we are crazy. Because that’s what you fear, when you get anxiety attacks that you’ve never experienced before. You’re afraid of going crazy. For me, at least, that was the case.
But sharing allows us to understand, to understand each other, and therefore to come closer, to reduce, emotionally, that social distance imposed on our bodies.
I am grateful to the people who have participated in the project, because without them, and without their testimonies, this project would not have been possible, and the message would have been in my head only.

From the stories of those who experienced the virus directly, to those, luckier like me, who only saw it from the window, without ever being infected, and without their family being infected. Because even those who have not had direct contact with this virus have lived through an experience that, psychologically and emotionally, is certainly not to be underestimated.

 

The project started in May, when there is still a lot of fear and suffering, and entering people’s homes is not so immediate. So much so that I was asked to take some pictures in a park. The goal is to give voice to the community and build a testimony that will help in the present to elaborate the collective mourning and the emotional experience, and that in the future can be a true testimony of what strictly belongs to photography as well: the “was”.

The photographic approach I try to pursue is as genuine and simple as possible. The subject matter is so complex that photography must not steal space from it. Neither should color. The intent is to document the “here and now”, not the “here and then” of the lockdown, but I enter people’s homes, to be able to access their intimate space, both physical and emotional.