May Day 2010
Take part in a demonstration. Because it's just to have fun, because of one's friends, because May Day in Milan is a true popular feast. The years when I went to all demonstrations, sometimes only to breathe the air of the people around you who see the world as you see it, feeling your same needs, wanting your same struggles, are far away. Far away. Now I work, live and think as a solitary being, at most in a couple, sometimes with friends, but I don't feel like part of the movement anymore. But every year I still go to the May Day, since I moved to Milan. Protected by my objective, isolated by the mechanics of my lenses, I can watch. This reportage tells what I've seen, instants that peeped out out of the hue and cry. Taking pictures of many people having fun together is not easy, it's a conflict between the passion that leads you to tell life and the instinct that leads you just to live it. And then again movement, a thousand arms and trunks and bodies that move at the same rhythm. And politics, "Bella Ciao"*, and a choir of locked fists up into the sky. There was also my fist, some years ago. It remained in my pocket this time, it refused to come out and join the others. I wonder: who are these people around me? Maybe it's only a feeling of alienation, maybe I work too much, I earn too little and I really don't have enough fun. Maybe that's why I felt close to those of San Precario**, that could - I think - make a group out of many solitudes, giving a sense to a suffocating individuality. Success, talent, work, a clearance sale of people or at most the profitable sale of one's own dreams.
Now, this is my testimony: a bewildered sense of membership to the worker's feast.
*Popular song of the Italian Resistance against nazi-fascists.
**Popular idol created to protest against the lack of guarantee in the labour market.
