This work began in a place where, for a while, my city falls silent.

The Carroponte in Sesto San Giovanni is a monumental structure that once belonged to the Falck steelworks. After the factories closed, it was transformed into a concert venue. At night, it is filled with music and thousands of bodies in motion. During the day, when the machinery of spectacle comes to a halt, it appears empty. The stage, built to be looked at, becomes a place from which to observe.

During these hours, young people pass through, stop for a few minutes; some stay. This is how I began to encounter them, drawn to the way I see them carry themselves in this space, at a distance from the performative representations through which they present themselves and are represented in order to be seen and validated.

There is something about the Carroponte that, for a moment, seems to loosen this fabric. The words of Virginia Woolf, from which the work takes its title, resonate in their bodies: for a few hours, their posture changes, and with it their way of orienting themselves in the world.

For three years, I have been returning here. Some encounters remained brief; others were repeated and developed into relationships. The portraits grew out of this gradual familiarity. Over time, photography became a way of observing the signs of this brief rupture in the organisation of the city, moving through time, and discovering otherness within what I thought I knew.

From this opening emerged the reflections that accompany the work: on the legacy of places, and on the relationship between the forms that organise existence and the possibility of finding one’s own inclination in the world.