How many days do we have to stay locked down? This is the question Monia Marchionni has heard her 5-year-old daughter ask dozens and dozens of times during the lockdown. This is the question we all asked ourselves, looking out of our windows into the silent world. It’s the question we didn’t know how to answer at first and then, over time, it became the question we didn’t want to answer.

The days we needed. This is Monia‘s answer, certainly more sensible than many others we have heard.

Monia Marchionni, born in 1981, is a photographer from the Marche region, from Fermo to be precise. After a diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts, a degree in Philosophy, a specialization in Contemporary Art History and work experience in the field of installation, she decided to dedicate herself exclusively to photography.

Since her first works, from the photographic series “Never Again the Fog in the Desert” taken in Chile and “Fermo Visioni Extra Ordinarie”, Monia has won several national and international awards.

Today, however, we want to focus on her latest project, which was born during the quarantine and which takes its title from the answer given to her daughter, “I Giorni Necessari” (The days we needed).

Through delicate shots, deliberately presented as diptychs, Monia Marchionni opens the doors of her house to us during those 56 days that it took to get the situation under control.

Like that of all of us, the photographer’s life was abruptly changed and the outside world became something to be seen, while the inside of her home was transformed into a new object of analysis of her art. The eye, and with it the lens, rest on family members, hands and faces, trying to tell a long period of waiting, boredom, fear, sacrifice, death, but also love.

It is precisely the latter, in fact, love for loved ones, a rediscovered love, which shines through more than anything else, and this suspended time and privations have made it even more essential.