Deafness is commonly considered a disease. For most of those affected, however, it is a condition. Deaf people live in a very close-knit and active community, which nevertheless has great difficulty communicating with the rest of society and risks isolation. The problem is not only linguistic, but cultural. Deafness is an invisible physical disorder to which society and the state pay little attention or consider only a medical problem. The deaf community, on the other hand, defends its condition and fights for integration.
The recognition of Italian Sign Language as an official language of the State is one of their main battles, to break down the barriers that limit access to many areas of daily life, including those of fundamental rights. This work is the result of an immersion in the world of the deaf that lasted over four years, of slow observation, of listening with the eyes.
It was complex to photograph something that could not be seen, that was not externally tangible. To be able to stay in their time, I changed my approach to the shot, no longer immediate and instinctive, but reflexive: the camera attached to the eyes to follow their movements, while they moved in a space made of silence. It took me more than a year to understand that I had to start not from the void, from what could not be heard, but on the contrary, from their noise.
A noise that comes from the higher tone of the voice, from the movement of objects, but also an internal noise. I realized how, compared to others, deaf people quickly go from silence to noise, from moving quickly to remaining almost still. The work I have done, in addition to documenting the claim of deaf rights within society, tries to tell what it means to live in silence, and how this implies, in my opinion, a continuous search for a sound or a noise, internal or external.