TIME MAZE - 1994-2001 | A BEGINNING

2.
MONTANA, USA. 1994.
A road runs through a forest of young pines, recently replanted following a huge fire. I wanted to blend into them: I framed and stepped into the frame.
It was 1994, somewhere near Butte, in Montana, North America, where I'd been working as an assistant to a carpenter for the summer. I had no awareness of myself but a burning desire to find it. I was even less aware of how to use the photography medium. It was my first self-portrait.

I was born in Florence, on 22 June 1973.
My mother's name is Gloria — everyone calls her Chicca — and she was born in Florence on 16 November 1949, the youngest of three children. Her parents were Bardo Lami and Anna Maria "Bebe" Bacci. Both families had been Florentine for generations, they had always lived in Florence.
My father's name is Walter and he was born, by chance, in Trento on 18 January 1938, the elder of two children.
His parents were Giacomo Castore and Maria Luigia Valle. Giacomo came from Bitonto, a town near Bari, and Maria Luigia came from Fusea, a little town in the Carnia district of northeast Italy, near the Austrian border. They married and spent a short time in Rome, then moving to Florence in 1938, where they spent the rest of their long lives.

5.
POGRADEC, ALBANIA. 1999 .
The memory of that day either materialized or I made it up later. The recollection was almost transparent, while overlapping images go further back, are deeper, intertwined with echoing sensations and landscapes. I was with two guys my age. They showed me around their area, a remote region, in the middle of nowhere, removed from the present and from the war.
In Rome I studied law because they told me it would be easier to find a job, but I would have been happier with history or art. As a student I was able to put off military service and I could live at home and didn't have to look for a job. I wasn't interested in the status of photographer, I wanted to use photography without compromise to push ahead, to run with my adventure, to defend myself and to grow, to try to be as free as possible, to see and understand the world around me better using my own means. Studying wasn't so tough, and I managed quite well, which left me time to go exploring what I wanted to learn for myself.
I met Ninni during this time, a stage director with a passion for Shakespeare. He introduced me to René Guénon, Gurdjieff, Pavel Florenskij, and more generally to metaphysics. I was obsessed with understanding, with unravel ling the mystery, clearing my head. In his considerations, Guénon compared different sacred texts and different religions, and thanks to the comparison and to the interpretat ion of signs, he took down idolatry and left the mystery intact. It is important that mystery remain such, that idols be shown the door: we all have the same origin and we adapt to times, places, climate. Being yourself, taking responsibility for what you are ... It's not important to understand everything.

6.
ROME, ITALY. 1999.
I was with Giorgio. Making sure nobody saw us, we climbed some out-of-bounds access stairs and listened to a Philip Glass concert as we lay on the floor on a dark balcony overlooking his piano. That music and our frame of mind created emotions difficult to describe. It was like being on the deck of a ship on stormy seas. I used a whole roll of film and I don't even remember doing it. Then I accidentally opened the camera and let light into it. At the time I despaired, I thought I'd made a stupid mistake. Losing control short-circuited my emotions, however, and stormy seas really appeared.
For a long time, from when I was seventeen until I was twenty-two, I spent all my free time in Rome smoking and listening to music with Giorgio. We hung out in record stores, we went to concerts, we didn't care about much else.

7.
DELHI, INDIA. 1997 .
Giorgio reading a guide book of Northern India.
In 1997 1 took a long trip around India with Giorgio and Saverio. We were twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four. It was our first — and only — trip together. India was like being struck by lightning in slow motion. How to move from book learning to field study. It was the first tangible, decisive experience of the limits of control and of rational thought. There was no way of continuing to resist. Your head reaches the point where things just happen: your will isn't the only factor that counts. It was a turning point. In everyone's life there are crucial moments of transition from one age to another. This was ours.

8.
DELHI, INDIA. 1997.
Saverio.

9.
FLORENCE, ITALY. 1998.
My father Walter had the looks of Michel Piccoli, vague, distant, and a little sad. He's sitting at a table under the pergola at da Carlino, the trattoria where we always went when I visited him in Florence. He lived there and in New York, and we weren't very close, both because we didn't spend much time together and because we didn't have a way of communicating. He worked, he tried to make something of himself, he lived his life. But he was there for me, in his own way but he was there. He showed me America and he never conditioned me. His absence was a gift because it gave me space and freedom, allowing me to grow untamed, uninfluenced.

At the time it was a challenge, practically impossible to photograph people close to me. I didn't ask anyone for anything, I was embarrassed. Self-consciously, I stuck to taking photos of just a few friends. I made a clear distinction between "snapshots" and real photography". I struggled to imagine they could be merged in one image. Despite myself I still took those hybrid photos but refused to see them, to consider them. I set them aside.

10.A
TYCHY, POLAND. 2000.

10.B
GLIWICE, POLAND. 1999.
In Gliwice there's a big statue factory, one of the oldest in Poland. In a wing where nobody went, there was a kind of storeroom, piled up with flawed statues of all kinds. There they were, in no particular order, a sort of emotive manual of recent history.
I wanted to go where so much had happened but where almost nothing else was happening. I wanted to breathe in History and try to build another, infinitely smaller but all my own. I needed to break away from the sanctuary of everyday life and escape. I felt suffocated, I wanted to feel as if I was part of a bigger world. Going to Poland was a gamble, like rolling a die. India was a wonderful place and I went with my best friends; Poland — Silesia in particular — was a hostile place with heavy-duty history behind it, plunged into an almost immobile present. I was alone, I didn't speak the language, and I was in a depressed industrial area, not knowing what to do.

11.
KOSOVO. 1999.
I can't not care, I can't not feel infinite tenderness for all those young people who go to war and don't come back, or who do come back, damaged forever. And I feel the same about the kids whose lives went completely off the rails, who have been let down completely, so hurt they couldn't cope, pain that overwhelmed them, scorching them in a split second or snuffing them out slowly.
The more I strive to be there for myself, the more I find the strength to urge my self on, the more I empathize with those who didn't make it, for those who fell and never got back up.

12.
LADAKH, INDIA. 1997.

13.
GLIWICE, POLAND. 2000.

Justyna.

During all that time I was hard, ferociously tough on myself and on those I loved. I was radical, so compromise was unacceptable. I was in no position to negotiate.

Extracts from the text conceived and edited by Valeria Moreschi, result of a conversation between her and Lorenzo Castore.