Nomadic Library

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Already winner of the Canon Award for Young Photography (2008), Alessandro Imbriaco, Italian photographer born in Salerno in 1980, confirms with this new work the relevance of his approach to photojournalism. Distributed by the Contrasto photographic agency (Rome) and represented by the Forma gallery (Milan), Alessandro Imbriaco followed from 2008 the Reflexions Masterclass course, directed by Giorgia Fiorio and Gabriel Bauret, and was selected in 2011 for the World Press Photo Masterclass. For several years, he has been interested in social issues linked to recurrent poor housing in large European metropolises. In conjunction with associations or organizations that are dedicated to the difficulties encountered by an ever-growing part of urban populations in finding accommodation, he travels through Rome and its urban fabric to document the lives of hundreds of families who survive in extreme precariousness in areas or areas. spaces on the outskirts of the city. It was during one of his investigations that the photographer discovered the territory of “Angela's garden”.

Located under a viaduct of the eastern ring road of Rome, in an area of ​​intense real estate speculation, this garden, neglected by all, proliferates on a marshy arm of the Aniene river. In view of its particular fauna (foxes, birds), the Roman municipality considered for a time to make it a site under environmental protection. As this classification measure never succeeded, the garden, abandoned, paradoxically became an island of survival where a homeless family found refuge, whose story Alessandro Imbriaco tells us. It is in a cabin nestled under the viaduct that Angela, a little girl of six, was born and raised; her parents, Piero, an immigrant from Sicily, and Luba, exiled from Russia, educated her in this safe but rudimentary refuge, unbeknownst to all. “With this photographic report,

All the strength of Alessandro Imbriaco's work is based on the confusion that seizes us in discovering images that do not appear, at first glance, under the auspices of social reporting. In a plant universe that one could take for a transposed representation of the Garden of Eden, human beings live and survive with dignity in a European city of the twenty-first century in conditions that one would like from another age.