Giulia Bersani – Stronger

The project started last March when Giulia Bersani, (b. 1992) photographer from Milan wrote on her Facebook wall the following announcement “I’m looking for a story to tell. If you think you have a pretty/strange/interesting life and you would like to trust me and work with me (wherever you live) feel free to write me.” A girl named Giada from Napoli answered:

“My life is a story which tells about shit and love” and then, as Giulia says, she continued describing her hometown, like a prostitute: “Beautiful and damned… It’s pure poetry… If you stop and stare at it, it wraps you up… There is the sea and so there is water and under it there is the vulcan’s fire… A vulcan in a city. It’s like standing on a bomb, you can feel the power of all those elements: fire, water, hearth… all together… This gives a fucking energy to this place and to its people and it makes absurd things happen…”.

A few weeks later, Giulia was there. “Giada is a girl full of energies and emotions with a 10 years old daughter and a difficult past (drugs and family problems). She greeted me in her house, with her daughter and her boyfriend, for two weeks. I think it has been one of the strongest experiences of my life; it was true, I could feel the fire inside them all and inside the city. I was really emotive too during those days and what remained into my hands when I came back home was a series of photos taken from really near, with a distorting lens, intense colors and undefined lines.”