Persona

‘Persona’ is the result and the synthesis of a four-year journey, the landfall of a personal and professional experience, a laborious process of self-understanding. Who are we? Why are we what we are? Why are others not what we are? Who are the others? It recounts, without the presumption of being able to understand it, the reality of youths whose aspiration to normality conflicts with the social world, that has always been little inclined to accept any abnormality. It wants to reveal the inconsistency of a stigma that is hatefully responsible for hindering dreams and ambitions from the beginning. It is a path that proceeds by removal, to the point of rendering the mask invisible, which, at lasts, resists. Do not want to depose it. Who is behind it? Persons. Everything else is idle. The photographs are the result of a project conducted at an educational facility for the reception of minors. The masks, crafted by them with waste materials, narrate the subjectivity of youths whose identities are too often lost behind the label of ‘community children’. The entire project was a process. The masks have been realized along an art-therapy path, hinged on the idea of re-signification of self through the artistic gesture of crafting an artifact, which somewhat could represent themselves, out of waste materials. After portraying them while wearing the mask they produced, I have asked the guys to choose the one from their belongings which was most significant for them; the concept of possession is pivotal, regarding identity, in a reality like the one they live in, where the community is a dimension that extends to every aspect of life. The last picture of the triptychs is lastly the result of a further and final moment of self-representation, in which I have tasked them with thinking about three words that could best describe their personality and then writing them down on a sheet.