These photographs were mainly taken in the years 2003-2006. When I started I still had no idea that I would become a photographer. When I look at them, I realise that although immature, ungainly and incomplete, they have the dignity of a reference point for me. Perhaps because in them I see contained potentially everything that would happen much later. It was a time when, still teenagers troubled by the thrill of the end of the millennium, we discovered ourselves becoming nomads, adventurers, pirates. These photos are small fragments of those years. For the uninitiated, the practice of raving consisted in illegally occupying a natural or post-industrial space for an unspecified period of time, living in it, dancing in it, and inhabiting it, only to abandon moving in vans and trucks, in search of the next adventure. But it wasn't just that. It was a whole lifestyle. It was a lifestyle of 'psychic nomadism' made up of arrivals, departures, festivals, and opium pickings that found their cosmogonic juncture at the moment of the rave. People who inhabited spaces without yet being inhabited by any social network yet. The asphalt of Europe flowed under the wheels of our trucks, carrying sound, carrying stories.
From a personal point of view years later I realised these photographs represented for me the first instinct to photograph something in order to render it harmless, to defuse the sense of wonder and amazement that assailed me at every step. Everything was huge: the space, the power of the speakers, the size of our freedom, the infinite selfishness of adolescence (1). These are just fragments of my wanderings among these architectures, ploughing through lines, passing rooms, climbing chimneys and finding myself (literally) walking in the sky. And then suddenly it would happen: the infinite perspectives would intersect to produce an encounter, space would stop dilating because you had met that gaze: perhaps, a new nomadic love had arrived. A new beginning. Speakers, sweat, mosquitoes and metropolitan mountains to climb in order to feel the world small beneath your feet.
"Game - magic - anarchy" as someone so beautifully put it. (2)
In a way these photos are fragments of a vanished world, an archaic diary of the years of my vertigo. (Nameless years)
Notes for a documentary on the nameless years.
They began with the largest art installation broadcast live on television: 11 September 2001. In the western world the passed almost in silence, rendered 'incognito' years by the fact that they had no name. Their numerical degree is 0, like the fool in the tarot. Is it possible that these nameless years (2000-2010), with their happenings, their temporary autonomous zones, their raves, their 'psychic nomadism' were really one of the last spaces of freedom offered to western man? A combination of variables that are now extinct made it possible: a non-gentrified urbanism that offered fragments and lacerations of the urban fabric in which to fit in, meet and pulsate, everything combined with satisfying but still non-totalitarian technological development (and not yet functional to surveillance capitalism). Not least an authentic psychedelia founded on the practice of travelling and organising happening. These were spaces where new models of existence were born through mimesis, encounters and music, where lives outside the system and sexual genders were exchanged de facto without satisfying any ideological, old or new hegemonic theories. Who were the young people of the Nameless Years? Sons of the fest of the century, the 1980s, of mass television culture and Japanese cartoons, they formed their aesthetics with the most expensive video clips in the history of video productions, and deconstructed them in favour of street life and the multiple forms of an underground floating on a great and strong thrill: the idea of the end of a millennium.
