Silence is a gift

Rione Sanità (Naples), Santa Lucia (Cosenza), Torre del Greco. There are places in Southern Italy that carry scars of incurable wounds on the walls and the skin of their inhabitants. In these wounds, the historical memory and the true face of the human being are kept. Silence is a Gift speaks of love and loneliness, life and death, pain and joy, but above all, intimacy. Intimacy is something extraordinary; it reveals the uniqueness of every human life. Intimacy, perceived as closeness, proximity, is a form of silent and discreet resistance. It’s a shelter from the passing of time, from existential crises, and from all the disintegrating factors that contemporary society imposes upon us: standardization, trivialization, social inequalities, and violence. In particular, I am drawn to the intimacy of the working class because, as Simone Weil writes in The Person and the Sacred: “The people are much closer to an authentic right— whether it be a source of beauty, truth, joy, or fullness — than those who grant them their pity. But not having reached it and not knowing how to attain it, it is as if they are infinitely far from it.” My images are an attempt to recover the meaning of life through the relationships and families that inhabit these places suspended between the stigma of marginality and the processes of gentrification. Inside these doors and windows lies a surprising energy of life, and precious stories tell of the authenticity of human life. This authenticity speaks to the other through the language of the body and deep relationships. All the images in the project were taken from 2015 to 2021 in Rione Sanità in Naples, Santa Lucia neighborhood in Cosenza, and Torre del Greco. Over the years, I have seen new lives born, children become teenagers and later parents themselves, and unfortunately, I have had to say goodbye to some. 

Ciro Battiloro