*HARD AS STONE* is an ongoing photographic project started in summer 2020 during an artist residency in Valmalenco.

The representation of the Alpine valleys often appears idyllic, bucolic, almost standardized. Green meadows, mountains, snow, rural and family life which shows genuine feelings and dynamics of a past perhaps lost. Just the kind of iconographic material that I found in the course of 2020 in a small e secluded mountain museum in the hamlet of Lanzada, in the upper Valmalenco, Lombardy.

Hundreds of images produced from the early 1900s onwards that give life to a stereotypical narration of a close valley, Valmalenco, which is a frontier territory, rich in history and tradition. And starting from this archival material I gave life
to a personal story of this valley, which is an exploration of its marginal corners, its limits,
a purely subjective interpretation of a territory which, like many Alpine areas, is facing transformations and new challenges. *HARD AS STONE* is a slow journey of discovery which, starting from the peculiar anthropology of these places, digs into the shadows
and contradictions of an alpine valley and its community, which speaks of roots, of bonds, of love towards a land,
but also of suffering and the need for adaptation, of abandonment and lives on the edge.
It is an "other" representation of a microcosm anchored to its past but forced to come to terms with his present
who finds himself living in a sort of limbo in which even his own identity seems to be questioned.

*HARD AS STONE* is an ongoing photographic project started in summer 2020 during an artist residency in Valmalenco.

The representation of the Alpine valleys often appears idyllic, bucolic, almost standardized. Green meadows, mountains, snow, rural and family life which shows genuine feelings and dynamics of a past perhaps lost. Just the kind of iconographic material that I found in the course of 2020 in a small e secluded mountain museum in the hamlet of Lanzada, in the upper Valmalenco, Lombardy.

Hundreds of images produced from the early 1900s onwards that give life to a stereotypical narration of a close valley, Valmalenco, which is a frontier territory, rich in history and tradition. And starting from this archival material I gave life
to a personal story of this valley, which is an exploration of its marginal corners, its limits,
a purely subjective interpretation of a territory which, like many Alpine areas, is facing transformations and new challenges. *HARD AS STONE* is a slow journey of discovery which, starting from the peculiar anthropology of these places, digs into the shadows
and contradictions of an alpine valley and its community, which speaks of roots, of bonds, of love towards a land,
but also of suffering and the need for adaptation, of abandonment and lives on the edge.
It is an "other" representation of a microcosm anchored to its past but forced to come to terms with his present
who finds himself living in a sort of limbo in which even his own identity seems to be questioned.