How are you

“How are you” is a four hands project between me and Kenaw Ayalew, a tourist gudie I met in La Lalibela (Ethiopia) during the beggining of the Covid pandemia.

I come back to Italy and he get stoked in his city with Covid19 virus spreading around and additionally a civil war started in Tigray, close to his place.
We decided to mold a dialogue between us into an audiovisual project to find a way to give an answer to a question very relevant at that moment: How are you?

As well as photographer I was asking myself how was possible to inform and working on news been home.
We decided to mix the diary of Kenaw in his house with images I was recording close to my city.
The towers that appear in the video are real, historical places used as defense and communication system in the XIV century in Apulia. I have staged the scenes to stress the impossibility to communicate and inform due the internet lockdown in Tigray. I felt myself as a relay.
The texts are Kenaw diary’s written in between November and December 2020. We did not modify anything but in the edit we didn’t follow a strict chronological order but an emotional one.
We made this video together to wonder if is possible to erase the difference between subject and object in photojournalism: both of us are either one and the other.
I decided to appear in the video to revendicate the chance of another storytelling based on a personal, female, intimate, contemporary perspective.

The project was realized in December 2020 as result of the residency at the Italian Cultural Institute of Addis Ababa in march 2020.