“Life is not what one has lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to tell it.” With these words by Gabriel García Márquez, NOSTOS begins — a photographic project by Sonia Simbolo that seems to move along the blurred edges of memory, where recollection becomes narrative and the journey becomes identity.

“Nostos” — a Greek word that evokes the idea of returning home, but also the deeper longing to return — here transforms into a visual and emotional experience, both personal and collective. Each photograph shot by Sonia Simbolo is a landing in an unknown port, an encounter with faces, gazes, melancholy, and hope. It’s a fragmented story made of unrepeatable moments, suspended between what was lived and what was felt.

The project unfolds like an intimate diary in which the author — through the lens — searches for her “elsewhere.” She chases it in every shot, recognizes it in the gestures of others, in the details that silently tell a story. But that “here” is never final. It’s a constant movement, a deep need to understand herself through encounters with others, to give form to what is unspoken, felt, or missed.

NOSTOS is a journey with no arrivals, only departures. Each image is a question: Will I truly be able to tell my story? Will my photos speak for me? Will they say what words cannot contain? It is in this continuous questioning that the strength of the project is revealed: in the tension, in the search, in the attempt to convey a truth hidden on the margins of the visible.

NOSTOS is a return that doesn’t exist — but is endlessly sought. And in that constant search, we find ourselves too.

Also read: Palermo’s Santuzza through the lens of Giacomo Barone and Gianluca Marrone