IL GIARDINO SEGRETO 

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 is not well. Her mother has died. I start crying. A young girl standing next to me hugs me and 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 those that are emotionally challenging for me. 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 with them.

I leave home with a heavy heart. It’s November, the same month we lost my grandmother, it’s cold, the sky is grey and the air is 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.

The small cemetery, however, 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 expected to find, I find life.

Raindrops are still hanging on the delicate stems. Maybe they are frozen. Nature seems unbothered. It appears to be nurtured by what we might have lost, transforming itself into the homage one wishes to leave for loved ones at the end of a long 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 or even interested.

2025. I prepare a short selection of my photographs for a workshop with a renowned photojournalist in Trieste. Last minute I decide 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 of them. Monika tells me 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. A new journey begins.