1
Taking an interest in adolescence can feel like a challenge. It’s not a time when teens really seek out “adults”—a group you belong to, Karla, even though you’re only a few years away from being a teenager yourself. In the age of the selfie, has photography helped you connect with them?
So, even though I’m still young, I feel quite removed from the mindset of teenagers—after all, there’s already a fifteen-year age gap between us!
That said, my sincere and deep interest in this pivotal age made connecting with the 224 high school students I met over two years feel natural and often easy. In schools where the hierarchy between students and teachers shapes every interaction, my « in-between » status—neither quite an adult in their eyes, nor a teenager anymore—turned out to be a real asset. In the end, the photography was secondary; it was my willingness to listen that, I believe, made it all possible.
2
Among your references for *Frammenti* is Pier Paolo Pasolini, who had the courage, armed with a camera, to seek out dialogue in 1964 in “Comizi d’amore” on the beaches of his country to explore the topic of romantic relationships. At times, he himself seems surprised by the candor with which people respond to him. Between you and the teenagers you met, 60 years later, was there the same candor?
I was just as surprised by how much a genuine interest can immediately bring out in people. Apart from the extremely shy or very immature teenagers, everyone opened up with disarming ease and sincerity. I heard more than one secret, more than one traumatic experience, or confession. The interviews weren’t long—20 to 45 minutes depending on the person—but I sensed that the vast majority simply had a desperate need to talk; and this gathering finally gave them the opportunity to do so.
3
If you think back to your own adolescence, did you feel more connected to the young people you met, or were they, on the contrary, very different?
Despite the passage of time, I recognized myself in many of the stories: the same doubts, the same impulses, the same ways of imagining the world; and I was quickly convinced of the profound universality of the adolescent experience.
Every generation of adults seems convinced that today’s youth are particularly adrift (as if concern for them were an anthropological constant). There is something strange about this collective amnesia: we forget just how intensely we ourselves grappled with these same issues. Today’s teenagers—rebellious, apathetic, searching for identity, or even sheltered from reality—are the same as those I knew in high school. What defines them—and what seems to me to be a constant—is this certainty that they have understood everything, even though there is still so much left to learn.
4
You launched “Frammenti” several years ago, and you’ve now conducted over two hundred interviews. Have you set a limit—in terms of time or location—for when the project will come to an end? Or could you continue it elsewhere and over a longer period of time?
For now, I’m putting it on hold, because it’s an extremely time-consuming project that requires a lot of coordination (and I’m on my own most of the time). There’s also a time constraint inherent to the project: adolescence is a brief period, and I want to avoid mixing generations within the same collection. For the Gen Zers I met—those who went through puberty during the pandemic, who had access to AI without any regulation, and who graduated from high school under Meloni’s far-right government—the collection of testimonials has just wrapped up with a final chapter in Sicily.
I have covered only eight of the twenty regions, which leaves a vast territory still unexplored: there will most certainly be a second, or even a third, visit in the coming years, for Gen Alpha and the generations that follow. I like the idea that this project will accompany me throughout my life and serve as a witness to certain pivotal moments in the history of our society and to the development of young people in a specific region—in this case, Italy.