GIARDINI SEGRETI

2013. I’m on the bus, heading home after university classes, to keep moving my belongings from my parents’ house to the new studio where I was going to live. My phone rings, and I can tell from my mom’s voice that she's not well. Her mother has died. I start crying. A young girl standing next to me hugs me, holds me tight.

2019. With my first analog camera, a Konica Autoreflex T4, I feel the need to step out of my comfort zone and explore landscapes I don’t see every day—especially emotionally challenging ones. When my parents tell me they’re going to the countryside to tend to my grandparents’ tombs, in a small, almost forgotten village in southern Romania, I decide to load a black and white film and go.

I leave home with a heavy heart. It’s November, the same month we lost my grandmother, it’s cold, the sky is grey, the air humid. I am prejudiced and expect to see mud in the cemetery, old tombstones and hardened faces from the countryside. I experience even a sort of anxiety, close to fear.

Yet, the small cemetery offers me a completely different universe from the one I had imagined. Instead of what I thought I would find there, I see myself surrounded by a strange garden—nature almost lavish with autumn flowers, some exaggeratedly overgrown, their sponge-like texture a result of the heavy rains. Instead of what I thought, I find life.

Raindrops are still hanging on the stems. Maybe they are frozen. Nature seems unbothered. It appears to be nurtured by what we might have lost - an homage at the end of some journey.

At home, I develop the photos and keep the scanned files for a long time in a folder on my computer. They are very dear to me but I believe no one else would feel positive towards them.

2025. I prepare a short selection of my photographs for a workshop with Monika Bulaj in Trieste. I decide last minute to add an unedited selection of the film I shot 6 years before. We look at the images together with the other photographers, and the pictures strike a chord with many. Monika tells me in Italian about Bruno Schulz’s writings, mentioning a secret garden that appears in one of his books. We finish curating the story. I go home and order the book.