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 teach me about plants, mushrooms, wild animals.
At the turn of the millennium I moved to the edge of the city, to a suburban neighbourhood fenced by the remains of what was once vast woodland – its paths marked by an invisible thread to the past, its trees containing ciphers leading on to other woods.
The forest of Selva Oscura is subjective and fleeting – a netherworld between reality, memory and dreams where a now adult gaze roams, looking for an epiphany or perhaps just clues, as it tries to find its way through the understory.
What started as a photographic process in the end became much more and in 2019 I finally left the city, following what I had come to understand was the real direction of the thread.