Giada Archidi | Eastern market

Eastern market. Every week-end in Milan at the parking lot close to the Cascina Gobba metro station, there’s a changing city, a city that breathes new air and new tastes from Eastern Europe. The area outside the parking lot of Cascina Gobba turns into a market and a place to exchange objects and food. This place is of great importance to the Ukrainian, Moldavian, Romanian and Russian immigrants that live it , as it represents on small scale what their country was, and they can imagine for few hours to be there. That’s how you meet every kind of stalls and the “carriers”: commuters who travel once a week from Eastern Countries to Milan, carrying packages to the families and earning a few dozen euro. But the inhabitants of this area call this traffic as “the way of the care workers”, as the confluence of these women in this area is very high, and their main occupation is taking care of our elderly (to whom we often don’t give importance). Entering this world, so different from our origins and from the daily life today we are linked to, is such an incredible experience: we can travel those far away countries just through the people that live them. I believe that men today should love their own country keeping their traditions but also knowing how to appreciate other countries which are found not just at the Cascina Gobba’s parking lot but all over the city. This reportage wishes to give a different look at the city, so that people can get to know a whole world inside the daily life of Milan.

Interview with Giada Archidi

(by Anna Mola)

Anna Mola: Looking at you pictures, I notice a great coherence between story and realization. Would you talk about how the idea has influenced the construction of the images? I mean: how the technique (framing, colours, post-production) was in service for the idea behind this reportage?

Giada Archidi: Eastern market was a personal project, I’m always curious about the other cultures, and in Cascina Gobba I’ve found a parallel world. The technique that I used was derived from street photography, it’s not an invasive reportage but it’s like a simple look without cultural influences, I chose to elaborate the images with the typical colour of crossed process to bring near the east places.

AM: Cascina Gobba is a quarter of Milan. A Milan really not recognizable in these images. How did you feel shooting them? As a street photographer or a foreign in your city also?

GA: When I was going for the first time in Cascina Gobba I felt to be in other country but my approach was like a street photographer, I love to capture the moment.

AM: By this time, we can’t talk about “one” Milan anymore. They are several Milan: a kind of “Chinese Milan”, “Arabian Milan”, “Indian Milan”, exc. Do you think you’ll develop this theme with other reportage about other cultures in Italy?

GA: I hope, in order to produce this works you need time to find the good place and if there is the good story. I would like to find the other small cultures in Milan, live their culture and tell an interesting story.

AM: In your web site, I see different kind of photography: portrait, urban landscape, concert photography. What’s the “common denominator”? Just experimentation or something else?

GA: I love photography and also videomaking, I think that experimentation and curiosity work like a “common denominator”.
I’m working in a new project, a common studio named ‘Bubbles’, it’s a container of ideas, a place where creative people can come to us and speak about their ideas and with “Bubbles team” and me we can turn these ideas into reality.

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