Rome is living in a particularly critical period in dealing with new immigrants coming to the city in search of a job and a new life. One of the most visible elements of this crisis is the increasing number of illegal urban settlements.
This photo series is a small collection of these temporary and precarious “accommodations” developing both in the suburbs and in the city center. In those place, where asphalt leaves the space to nature, new immigrants (coming especially from East Europe and North Africa) can find a shelter.
The attempt of my work is to map these places, not with the intention of social denunciation or easy commiseration, but by trying to create a shared fantasy which belongs to all of us. The suggestion is the first idea we get of our world, if we think to children’s drawings, where fundamental things are condensed in a landscape with a tree, a little house and some people.
This basic landscape is what I am ideally trying to recreate in my pictures. Even if the house is just a mattress under a tree, or between two bushes, that place, at that moment, represents what we consider home: protection, habit, safety, the thin line between what is inside and what is outside.
— Alessandro Imbriaco