A Reunion in the Mountains

Even though I grew up in a city, my roots come from the countryside. My mother’s family is from the rural interior of São Paulo, Brazil, and it was with them that I spent much of my childhood. We were a group of children who walked through open fields, swam in muddy ponds, climbed trees to pick fruit, hid among the cornfields, and ran whenever we realized there was a snake hole along the path. We jumped over my aunt’s fence, and if it wasn’t the dogs protecting the territory - barking at the intruders (us) - it was the rooster chasing after us, which was, in truth, far more terrifying and aggressive than the dogs.

I grew up with a love for walking, for mud, for the warm morning eggs I would collect from the coop for my aunt. As I grew older, far from nature, and after being raised in the city, I had the opportunity to go far away, crossing seas and continents. It was in Italy, where my family originally came from, that I found myself again as a girl, walking through the mountains.

With that flame reignited, though now in different fields, I learned I had to be cautious not only of snakes and roosters, but also of snowbanks, loose stones high in the mountains I climbed, unfamiliar people along the way, the vulnerability of being a young woman alone in open spaces, and the lack of experience in unknown territory. And it was within those unknowns that I discovered my strength and my passion.

Photographing in the mountains became a doorway to a reunion with both my younger self and the woman I have become.