Lozio Settembre 2024
book
127 pages, 15,5x21,5 cm
- 2024 - 2025
Design by Michele Bellinaso
This publication emerges as a testament to a participatory practice aimed at exploring the relational fabric of a small community through shared memory and storytelling. In the dispersed municipality of Lozio, where around 350 people live divided among four hamlets, we propose a project that values the personal stories of local women, weaving their narratives into a network that reveals the invisible social fabric of this community.
The work consists of a book and a collection of “fairy tales” born from a participatory process: each woman tells an anecdote about another one she has chosen, takes a photograph of her in her home, fills out a form with biographical data, and donates a piece of fabric. The storyteller decides how to portray the person she has chosen, selecting the pose and the setting—a gesture that reveals her way of seeing her. This becomes a symbolic act of identity transfer, in which the signature and photograph represent the image of a woman seen through the eyes of another. Each signature, each name, is a gesture of identification that transcends the mere bureaucratic act, transforming the objective description into an experience of empathetic immersion.
The work thus becomes a living archive, a collective narrative that not only documents but transforms and renews the perception of self and of the other. The act of telling and portraying becomes an experience of exchange: the observer is in turn observed, the storyteller is in turn told. The material element plays a fundamental role in this research: fabric, writing, and signature become instruments of identity transfer— tangible signs of a relationship that unfolds in space and time. Each gesture, each trace left by the participants becomes a fragment of collective history, revealing how identity is a process in constant transformation.
Included in the group exhibition Falìa* AIR 2024 — Lozio, 2025
Featured in the official residency catalogue
Selected for the second edition of NUSCA (Nothing Until Something Comes Along), Independent Festival dedicated to Cinema and Publishing — Venice, 2025