There’s a moment, during every journey, when you realize that the destination was never really geographical. It’s exactly there that Where I Met Myself – Portugal begins, the photographic project by Marco Frattaruolo, born from a solitary and intuitive crossing of Northern and Central Portugal.
It’s between September and October 2024, and Porto is wrapped in a veil of smoke. The fires have transformed the sky, ash settles like an omen. It’s from this almost post-apocalyptic landscape that Marco Frattaruolo sets off, with no map and no clear destination. “I was searching for something,” he writes, though he didn’t yet know what.
From there, the path fragments: Braga, Guimarães, Amarante. Cities where time seems to have stopped running, inhabited by elderly people moving slowly, by facades that tell stories of centuries past. There’s no nostalgia, but a strange calm. A necessary pause before slipping toward the coast.
The Silver Coast, in fact, is anything but placid. Wild dunes, restless skies, surfers anxious for waves that never come, distracted girlfriends reading books, old cars abandoned in the sun. Every detail seems to come from a parallel world where reality has shifted, leaving space for a suspended and rarefied dimension.
The project moves through associations rather than descriptions: a girl focused on her handiwork, a naked man immersed in mud, rosaries entwined in wrinkled fingers, a lifeless octopus cradled like a sacred object. These are images that seem to have surfaced from a lucid dream, where the boundary between tenderness and desolation is razor thin.
Where I Met Myself – Portugal is not a reportage, it’s not a travel journal, and maybe it’s not even just photography. It’s a visual exploration of the moment when you look at yourself in the mirror through the eyes of others — whether they’re people, places, or everyday gestures. It’s an attempt to give shape to that restlessness that doesn’t seek answers but only to be heard.
The sea, in all of this, becomes both symbol and constant presence. Blue, cold, impenetrable. The waves, silent and always ready to erupt, seem to contain the same tension as the project: that of a present we can no longer decipher, but which keeps calling out to us.
