Z - On Pain and the Unspeakable
2019 - ongoing
“Z” is the unspeakable, the heinous, the unbearable. “Z” is invisible. We reject its existence.
Then, it happens to us or to someone close. Out of the blue, everything turns into its opposite.
Suffering from a serious disease takes you to recalibrate every parameter of your life. It forces you to subordinate the mind’s needs to the body’s. It has you face a new sense of time. The disease makes everything darker around you, but it casts a light on what is really important. Those who love you will stay, everyone else will go. Yet, despite all the love, a silent and deep pain is left there, along with the sensation of being completely alone.
Having cancer makes you a mythological creature. Something everybody heard of, but few actually saw it or dare to see it, not even touch. I still find it hard to believe that this actually happened to me. My mind tries to fight back the unimaginable, but the body does its duty and the concept becomes flesh, sore muscles, fatigue.
“Z” is an attempt to narrate through images an event that radically changed my life: the diagnosis of breast cancer. The project started out of the need to sublimate pain and to find a way to express my emotions. Later on, I realized I wanted to make the disease more visible, along with its metaphoric and tangible consequences. I chose to show a new body, which deserves to be acknowledged as valuable beyond the canons of feminine beauty. The bodies of those who are still alive, together with the many victims, are the tangible truth of the urgent need to find cures by truly supporting research and by acknowledging that prevention starts from a more ethical and sustainable lifestyle, for human beings and our planet.
