In Borderland, photographer Filippo Barbero constructs an emotional atlas that moves through time, memory, and landscape, following a thin line where past and present brush against each other without ever fully overlapping.
Developed between 2018 and 2024, the project stems from a physical and mental return to a familiar territory: a small rural village in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, a place of childhood, refuge, and emotional formation.
Here, among silent hills and his grandparents’ house, Barbero learned to look at the world as a border space, where everything seems to exist in a state of indefiniteness.
The title is not just a geographical reference, but an existential condition. Borderland is an in-between, suspended land, where the photographer moves in search of traces: of a time perhaps lived too little or, conversely, internalized to excess.
The images do not document, celebrate, or symbolize. Rather, they attempt to decipher reality as it passes through the body, memory, and a constant emotional tension, held in a fragile balance between joy and pain.
The landscape thus becomes an intimate interlocutor. Nature, living beings, domestic spaces and open ones seem to desire direct contact with the author, renewing a relationship built over time. In this silent dialogue, Barbero reworks his own emotional inheritance, turning personal experience into a visual material capable of speaking about belonging, growth, and family bonds without ever slipping into explicit nostalgia.
In Borderland, time is not linear. It flows, layers, and returns. The past seeps into the present and suggests future directions, like a light wind that accompanies images and memories: summer nights, conversations with his grandfather, eyes turned toward the sky from a damp meadow on a gentle slope. These are fragments of life that surface without ever being fully explained, leaving room for a dreamlike, suspended dimension.
More than a photography book, Borderland is a process of intimate redemption. An attempt to reconcile what has been with what is, accepting instability as a necessary condition for continuing to search. In this border space, Barbero offers no definitive answers, but invites us to pause, to listen, and to recognize the value of the traces left by time.
