A Public Exhibition Returning Faces and Stories to Sassari

A few months ago I was invited to Sassari, Sardinia to create and develop a photographic project about the historic city centre. Sassari has just over 120,000 inhabitants and keeps losing population year after year. It's a demographic winter, fewer births, more elderly people, quiet departures. You see it in the historic centre, empty houses, shuttered shops, absences that pile up over time. Over the last decades, people moved to the new neighbourhoods, more comfortable, with parking, lifts, services. The city is ageing, not enough jobs, and young people are looking elsewhere, other cities or other countries. So the historic centre has gaps, but also new presences, families and people from other places who keep the daily fabric alive despite the fragility.

I spent a week talking and shooting people as I met them roaming the streets, using shutters, balconies, thresholds as the background while I walked, listened, paused. In this tangle of stone and crumbling plaster, closed doors and lit windows, this series is born. Not a map, not a census, just fragments of life. Each portrait is a small dam against the emptying, a simple way to bring people back into public space through the gaze.

The final idea was to use the lowered shutters and empty shops as a natural display for the photos. And thanks to Endasform and Biokip, a public exhibition was born. My 30 images turn the urban space into a widespread exhibition on 25 streets, returning faces and stories of the community and bringing people back to the streets.