An artist and photographer who has developed into a writer.
INTERVIEW by VALENTINA DI CESARE
Can you tell us something about your ancestor’s emigration? Where did they come from?
My paternal grandparents were born, raised and married in Calitri (AV) Italy. My paternal ancestry goes back a few hundred years in Calitri, though perhaps by way of our deep ancestral ‘Gens’, originating in Gubbio and Rome. They married in 1920 and emigrated to NYC. My grandfather had already been to New York and back as a young man, working and bringing money home to his parental family. They raised their family in New York City. My maternal grandparents were also Italian immigrants of the wave of the early 1900s. They too were born in the South in Calabria and Sicily and married in NYC where they raised their family. I currently live in my paternal grandmother’s childhood home — a two-room stone house in the Centro Storico of Calitri. This year is the 25th anniversary of my first foray to the town. I arrived in 2000, the Millennial Jubilee and have lived here full time since 2010.
When and how did you choose photography and literature to narrate the world and to make others share your view of things?
As I wrote for one of my early biography requests, ‘My love of photography began as I watched my father expose and develop contact sheets on the family kitchen table.’ Photography has been in my life as a form of artistic expression since then. My father gave me my first 35mm camera, an Olympus OM1 35mm for my 18th birthday. Before that, it was a Polaroid Land camera and various Kodak Instamatics. I studied Fine Art and Art History in High School and I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Art History and History of Photography degree from Long Island University, Southampton, New York. From there, I lived twenty years as a resident of Los Angeles where I was an Artist Agent, and Photo Editor and Director for national and international advertising and editorial companies. I have been an executive producer, curator, and consultant for art and photography exhibits, books, and events in both Italy and the U.S.
My career has always been within the fields of art and photography and design, up to co-designing the two memoirs I have published using my own images of the town to illustrate chapters and the companion book / author website.So, I consider myself an artist and photographer who has developed into a writer. My artistic and visual acuity has powerfully informed and guided my writing. This is my photographer turned writer origin story. At heart, a visual storyteller.
What inspired your books THE GHOSTS OF ITALY and STILL LIFE WITH SAINTS? How and when did you get the first inkling that you’d write this book?
I was struck early in my journey by the idea that I would write this story. Actually it came to me as a voice in my head on that first bus ride up to the town back in 2000. It then took me a few years to complete THE GHOSTS OF ITALY simply because a significant part of the story had yet to unfold. All the while, I was documenting the village with my OM1. Creating what I called my sight-map of the town over those early years, and of my experiences in it. I must have taken a thousand or more images now on various formats of the vie and vicoli and characters of the town. I wrote STILL LIFE WITH SAINTS from the POV of ‘una figliola,’– what I came to understand as an endearment, ‘a daughter of the town.’ Once embedded in their rural Italian microculture I wrote from mental imagery, deeply rooted instinct, and as some here would say personal courage. To live in, and write about, these hilltop places and the myths of their streets and to give that story wide appeal, I would have to agree. Turned out to be the voice of destiny.
What has changed in you since you first arrived in Calitri, documented the town in photographs, then wrote two memoirs about your experience of life and culture from a remote region of hill town Italy?
Interpreting and writing about this experience has changed me in profound ways. My interest and exploration of life here however was never from a scholarly point of view but from an artist’s point of view. A journey into another culture, another world, albeit of my ancestry, of listening to their stories and adapting to their livelihoods. I am currently writing book three. Always from the perspective of a daughter of the community — who the townspeople view as a kind of pathfinder. An insider outsider. On a kind of philosophical journey between this culture and my (original) own and how they intersect; themes exploring the folklore of the feminine and mother daughter relationships among other cross-cultural threads.
Have you ever felt, directly or indirectly, what scholars call ‘emigration disorientation’? what you feel when your cultural references are not clear?
Disorientation plays a minor role in my daily life here, if at all. I have always felt guided included and at home. It’s a kind of spiritual stewardship to live in rooms once populated by my paternal grandmother’s matriarchal line. I feel their feminine companionship. The companionship of all the women up and down my stone lane is soul enriching. It has been twenty-five years since I first stepped foot in the village that I have now called home for almost as long. I have never addressed myself as a migrant or emigrant or even an expat. To me I was simply on an inner journey to uncover some personal truths. Curiosity informed my first journey in 2000 and continued serendipity took care of the rest.
You can read the website article here. And in Italian by clicking here.
