Until recently, I had only ever lived in cities. But when I was a child my parents owned a house in the mountains where my father, country-born, would take me for walks in the woods to show me plants, mushrooms, wild animals.
A few years ago trees – often solitary and looming – started appearing like a refrain throughout a project about my then suburban neighbourhood: I took this as a cue to seek out forests again.
The woodland of Selva Oscura is subjective and fleeting – a netherworld between reality, memory and dreams, where personal history and imagination collide and where a now adult gaze roams, looking for an epiphany or perhaps just clues, as it tries to find its way through the encroaching dark.
What started as a photographic process eventually led to other things, and in 2019 I finally left the city.