ULTIMO DOMICILIO (2008-...)

This work consists of several chapters and is constantly evolving. Each one is about a house that no longer exists. I photographed these houses shortly before they were emptied and thus disappeared.
I know these houses for various reasons and they say a lot about what I was looking for moving around through the years. Each of them represents an inner complex world. They speak of a passage and of intimacy. Houses made of objects. Places witnesses of fragments of lives of individuals and families coming from different regions and backgrounds that have nevertheless shared the course of History and cultural references: this contributes to determine the development of different private stories apparently insignificant but revealing a mutual territory.

Sarajevo and Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina (2008).

Twelve years after the end of the siege of Sarajevo, I went to see what traces were left. I was looking for houses abandoned during the war and left behind as they were. It was not easy to find them because most were destroyed or renovated, therefore unrecognisable.
The house in Sarajevo was abandoned because it was too easy a target for snipers. The owner was already ill before the siege and lived there alone. He had lost his wife and son during the war. His nephew took him to a flat in the valley, which was safer and more secure. The house remained uninhabited and almost untouched until 2008.
The house in Mostar, on the other hand, was a villa owned by a wealthy family that moved elsewhere at the start of the war. It was exactly on the front line, a place too dangerous. The house remained unattended for a long time. It was a free place - no electricity was paid for, which for some strange reason was never disconnected - so musicians would jump in, plug their instruments into amplifiers and play. Then one day the villa caught fire.

Brooklyn, New York, United States (2009).

It was on Grand Street, Brooklyn, and was Adam Grossman Cohen's flat for twenty-five years. A Jewish filmmaker born in New York to a family of Austrian and Belarusian descent. He lost his father, the influential photographer, teacher and political activist Sid Grossman, when he was still very young and over the years has built up a lifelong inner dialogue with him. Sid generated in Adam an inspiration of pure, metaphysical beauty but also inflicted on him a widespread sense of loss and inadequacy. This flat is the essence of a private universe formed to create a precise feeling of belonging, that deep emotional bond that makes us feel part of a family or familiar with someone or something.
New York has always been the icon of 'starting from scratch', but it is important to have references when the origin is obscure. In August 2010, Miriam - Adam's mother who was visiting the flat for the last time before returning it to the owner - told me on the phone: 'It's completely empty now. It's beautiful, the little museum of innocence."

Cracow, Poland (2010).

This was my home and the centre of my life for six years - from 2004 to 2010.
A neutral place to grow up free and undisturbed. In the beginning and for a while, the house was quite empty, then it slowly began to fill up with things that soon became familiar and mingled with objects from the past. It was the place that kept and strengthened my desire to build something new. It was a space, not only physical, projected into the future: a real beginning.

Finale Ligure, Italy (2010).

Part of this 16th century palace in north-western Italy is still untouched by the passage of time. It belongs to the de Raymondi, a family of military aristocracy. The house has stood still for centuries and today is uninhabited most of the year.
In 1836, King Carlo Alberto of Sardinia was hosted here by his close friend and mythical war hero Lorenzo de Raymondi, known as the man with the silver skull because of a battle wound that forced him to replace part of his skull cap with a silver membrane.
The passage of time is absorbed by objects, books, paintings, documents, notes of all kinds: a private history that developed together with that of Italy.

Fontenay Mauvoisin, France (2011).

This house is located about half an hour from Paris. It was the home of the painter Hélène Bauret, a lady of Russian origin who spent a long part of her life here.
Her husband, Jean Bauret was the art director of a textile factory. Over time, he managed to detach himself from his career by devoting himself more and more to music, writing and painting, isolating himself in this house with his wife. After Jean's death in 1990, everything was complicated for Hélène.
He had always been a strong guide on her path of growth. He initiated her into a new way of life and pushed her to develop a rigorous lifestyle devoted to her work, renouncing the distractions of the city's artistic environment, even if at times the isolation may have seemed too much for her. Hélène lived a withdrawn life, but in this way she was able to develop an inner world that is revealed in her painting with its unmistakable stroke.
Since her death, her son Gabriel has kept the house as it was for years, untouched.

Rome, Italy (2012).

These are some of Giorgio Mortari's vinyls.
Giorgio has explored various forms of expression and has always pushed forward. He was the founder and artistic director of Dissonanze, one of the most innovative European festivals dedicated to contemporary music and digital arts.
Music has been a fundamental part of his life since adolescence: a way out, an alternative to something already written.
Because of his profound and transversal knowledge of it, his personality could be said to combine the most diverse musical genres: from pop to gothic, from jazz improvisation to the most meticulous minimalism, from punk to contemporary classical, from acoustic rock to techno. He sublimated extremes with a special touch, all his own.

Casarola, Italy (2013).

Casarola is a village lost in the mountains of the Parma Apennines. The Bertolucci family moved here a long time ago. They came from the Maremma, in accordance with what the first poem in the collection La camera da letto, one of Attilio Bertolucci's best-known works, tells us. The title refers to the corner room where Attilio used to sleep with his wife Ninetta and where so much of his poetry originated. Attilio is one of the greatest Italian poets of the 19th century. His life, his inner world and his work are inextricably linked to Casarola. His sons Bernardo and Giuseppe grew up here. It is where they began to experience the world and nature within and without.
The mythological, fantastical and intimate relationship with the thick walls of this house and what was around it was the ancestral source of their creativity, the place where reality and imagination cohabit: the eyes of a man and his sons under the protective wing of a loving wife and mother transform beauty and mystery into vision on a daily basis.

Milan, Italy (2016).

This was the studio (and sporadically also the home) of Giuseppe Spagnulo (1936-2016) in Vigano di Gaggiano, near Milan.
Pino is one of the most important contemporary Italian sculptors.
He was a true friend and a solid point of reference. In this magical place, I spent many long, beautiful days watching him work and play with fire. We would keep each other company surrounded by his ancestral sculptures and prototypes, amidst the smell of extinguished Tuscan and mineral dust, with classical music from the radio always on in the background.
A master of earth and fire, his primitive and generous energy is in all his work - ceramics, iron and paper - and in all his actions - daily and political - always at a high temperature.

Apolis (2017).

This polyptych combines the contents of the various cardboard boxes in which the visible essentials of Bohdan Bielkiewicz's life have been compressed in the form of small objects, books, photographs, letters and whatnot.
Bohdan was born on 18 January (the same day as my father's birth) in 1940 in the Tatar enclave that at the time lay between Poland and Lithuania, the son of Prince (Kan) Atta Baalbekkowwaicz and the Lithuanian Queen Paskaukaus. In 1946 his family's land was expropriated by the Soviet regime and Bohdan began to move with his mother and sister between various cities in Poland and Berlin while his father was deported to Siberia. At 15, he enters the Gdansk Naval Academy where he studies for two years. He learns to assemble kayaks: from then on a constant in his life. He then moved to Krakow where he graduated in Persian philology. After his studies and an unsuccessful attempt to move to Tehran, he spent a long period in Afghanistan (1970-79): there he studied Afghan philology and Islamic theology, earning the opportunity to teach the Koran (he is a talib or 'one who tries to be better'). This is the best period of his life, he feels at home there like nowhere else. He lives in Kabul, although over the years he conducts ethnographic field research that takes him to visit a third of the Afghan territory (often on horseback), until the Red Army invasion of 1979. In Kabul he marries a Polish researcher with whom he has a son, but their relationship ends badly and wife and son return to live in Krakow. After the occupation he finds refuge in Ladakh where he moves from monastery to monastery continuing his studies in various directions. During the winters he interspersed stays in Ladakh with increasingly frequent periods in India where he moved permanently in 1983. In Hyderabad he graduated in Ayurvedic medicine. After his studies, he moved to Delhi. In 1993, due to the tragic death of his son, he returned to Krakow where he practises as an Ayurveda doctor, translates ancient Afghan and Tajik stories and writes books on the Pamirs.
I have known Bohdan since 2003 and we always meet when I am in Krakow. He is a stern and strong man. He carries with him an aura of a hero from another era. He never likes to talk about his private life, there is a constant restlessness that oppresses him. Then one day he meets Zuzanna and everything changes. From being tough and inaccessible, he turns into a vulnerable and alive man. Zuzanna's presence brings a new light and opens Bohdan up to a willingness to share. They are in love. After 11 years their story ends. Bohdan begins to feel the years passing and does not resign himself to the end of their love. Since his lung insufficiency does not allow him to travel by kayak, he decides to set off on a bicycle back to the Pamirs. He dies in Istanbul at the beginning of June 2017. He leaves behind books, studies, research of all kinds, an extraordinary love for a woman.

Rome, Italy (2021-22).

After the passing of Bernardo Bertolucci in November 2018 and the following unexpected loss of his wife Clare Peploe in June 2021, their home remained orphaned but always the same and alive, inhabited by them despite their physical absence.
I had already been to photograph Bernardo's studio at Clare's invitation and then, since she too is no longer with us, I received the same invitation from his granddaughter Valentina and so I had the privilege of being able to spend time with Bernardo again, having free access to the spaces and all his things, which I took the time to observe, study and photograph with the necessary care, trying to enter into a relationship with the objects and memories of a life that, placed in that house, speak of a physical world linked to everyday life but also and above all of an extraordinary inner world.
Books, photographs, screenplays of film masterpieces and others of projects that were never realised, letters, notes, paintings and family objects of various kinds that make up the poetic universe of a life lived with joy and fury thanks to an uncommon timing and talent, a source of inspiration for those who had the good fortune and joy of experiencing Bernardo up close but also for those who were only able to get to know him through his work, a precious gift for all.

Text by Lorenzo Castore