I’m interested in stories. I move between ethnography, documentary photography, critical writing, and design. In my free time, I run in the mountains, more to keep humble than to stay fit.
Between 2005 and 2019, I lived in Rome, Venice, New York, Milan, Amsterdam, Munich, Prague, Istanbul, and Berlin. During that time, I worked for Assist Digital, frog, Fjord, and MING Labs – where I served as Design Director, responsible for both European offices.
Then, the limitations of design – increasingly at the service of technology – have shifted my focus to contexts where it can once again become a political instrument.
Invisible Territories
I look at human systems that have failed, the dimensions where the market shows no interest. Places where the need for a new vision is most urgent, but where access to adequate skills is lacking: local governments are often incapable of understanding the complexity of their territories, and hyper-technical professionals are ill-equipped to work on social innovation, participatory planning, and processes of real change. Every now and then, I write or talk about it.
Today, I live in a nearly deserted valley, a protected area of the Friulian Dolomites and a UNESCO World Heritage site. A virgin forest until the Middle Ages, then exploited for centuries until environmental and social collapse, and finally submerged by a hydroelectric basin in the twentieth century. An infrastructure presented as progress, which erased geographies and completed the dispersal of the community. This territory stands as a warning of what happens when human priorities push natural limits and, at the same time, serves as a privileged laboratory to imagine new ways of inhabiting lands marked by renewed balances
When I’m not here, I still spend much of my time in post-functional, post-industrial, post-urban, or post-demographic places: stagnant, small and medium-sized cities, “zombie” towns, crumbling mountains, exploited and polluted plains, invaded waters and coasts. Seeking new perspectives on the forgotten Italy.
