Mirko Ostuni and the Story of a Submerged Adolescence

1 year ago

Fragments that cling to memory through grainy images, fleeting glances, and repeated gestures. This is the space in which Mirko Ostuni and his work unfolds. Born in 2003 in Puglia, Ostuni is a photographer who, after studying at IED in Rome and taking part in several collective projects, will present his work Onde Sommerse at the Liquida Photofestival — a project that is both a diary and a field of study.

It all began in 2018, with the opening of a skatepark just two hundred meters from his home. That place, Ostuni recalls, was the spark for a narrative process that never let go. Skateboarding, friendships, sweat, and adolescence blend together in Onde Sommerse, a series of images that gave birth to two fanzines and an ongoing reflection on the teenage years — on what remains and what was never truly experienced.

«I’ve always felt like an outsider to the things I’ve lived through since I was 14,» Mirko explains. «One of my mom’s friends once told me that I never really experienced adolescence, because I was already documenting it». That’s where photography becomes a tool to grasp something that might otherwise slip away: a tension between instinct and analysis, between participation and observation. It’s no coincidence that his work alternates between a diaristic — urgent, visceral — approach and a more scientific, rational one, useful for “visually deconstructing” the recurring themes of his generation: subcultures, music, social struggles.

There’s no romanticized nostalgia in his work, but a kind of living, necessary melancholy that comes through even in the lightest of images. It’s an attempt to understand a moment in time as it’s happening — or maybe right after. «When a person realizes what adolescence is,» he says, «it means their adolescence has just ended». For Mirko, photography is not just a way to tell stories, but to understand them. And to give back some complexity to that phase of life when every emotion feels definitive.