In 2019, I took part in MANIFESTO | Iconografie dell’indipendenza, a project initiated in 2017 by Spazio Y in Rome, which invited different cultural spaces and independent organisations to express their own idea of independence through a poster.

The second phase of the project was developed by NESXT in collaboration with Mercato Centrale Torino and brought together proposals from numerous independent organisations in Italy and beyond. Each interpreted the idea of independence from their own experience, creating, together, a collective manifesto made up of many voices.

My proposal came from a personal and spontaneous idea. The photograph was made in Calcata, in collaboration with Davide Marzattinocci, now Davide Gualtieri, who took the photograph. The proposal was presented through his cultural association.

The image carries the words: “Ascendo verso di me, è la mia scelta” — “I rise towards myself, it is my choice.”

For me, it was a way of speaking about independence from an intimate place: choosing myself, growing, becoming better, and continuing to build my own path. Not as a declaration of self-sufficiency, but as a personal decision to move towards the person I want to become.

The photograph was part of the MANIFESTO exhibition journey throughout 2019, first presented in different locations in Turin — including the city’s billboard circuit, the Turin Book Fair and the Antiche Ghiacciaie at Mercato Centrale Torino — and later during the NESXT festival at the Docks Dora.

In November, the project arrived in Rome at MACRO ASILO, where it was presented from 29 November to 2 December. The exhibition brought the different posters together in a work-in-progress installation, creating a collective landscape of images, words and different interpretations of independence.

Today, when I look at that photograph again, the words still resonate with me.