Since time immemorial, human beings have been talking, it is one of the salient characteristics of the human species: they chat to each other, they converse with real people, things or symbols, they talk to distant people through the ubiquitous mobile phones, they even make inanimate objects talk to each other symbolically. It is a continuous and pervasive chatter that fills squares and streets, private and hidden places, towns as well as villages.
“And it is known that people talk because they have their tongues in their mouths and in the end no one knows how things really are.” (Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Una poco di buono, p. 92, Sellerio editore Palermo, January 2025); not to mention the persistent treacle, with rare exceptions, that comes from radio, television and social media.
For my part, with this collection, I have enjoyed finding on the streets of cities moments of dialogue between people, things, animals, perhaps even carried out only through a glance, but humble, without rhetoric.
I play at attributing words or thoughts of my own to strangers who happen to be in front of my lens, perhaps with the unquenched curiosity of someone looking in from the outside to know what the fat and cheerful friar is saying to his distant interlocutor, the lady and the soldier or the two wooden swans.
