Maturandi 2020

The voice of students who took the last exam of the high school, the Italian "Maturità", during the pandemic, in the European center of the diffusion of Covid-19.

In may and june 2020 I have produced a project with students from Milan, preparing their final high school exam, the italian “Maturità”.
I portrayed them and through a questionnaire / interview I collected their stories and testimonies from this period. I collected about 50 subjects.
The aim of the work was to give a “microphone” to a generation that has been in an extremely complex and delicate moment of their life,
of orientation, of choice of the future path, be it working, university or other made even more critical for many of them by the pandemic.
Problems of the school system during the pandemic are still very current.
I made this work with the belief that the voice of these young people could add significant elements to the narrative of the historical period that we are experiencing especially because, as it was for doctors and health professionals in the front line of the fight against Covid-19, these students are in the European epicenter of the spread of the virus and they live something “exceptional”.
I chose to photograph everyone with their own mask for two reasons: the masks characterize the historical moment we are experiencing and the safety regulations currently in force oblige us to wear them;
the set of faces partially covered by the masks will represent a historical document for these students just like a classic class photo.

Captions are short excerpts of the most articulated interview I did with students.