Giancarlo

This is a story that highlights and values the people suffering from mental disabilities.

I met him by chance when he occasionally came to town. It was like an apparition of a man wrapped in an aura of mystery that fascinated me. And so, one day I found myself ringing the doorbell of his house. Giancarlo does not speak phrases of circumstance, he goes straight to the heart, he doesn’t like pleasantries or clichés that enclose many relationships that we define as normal, even if he prepares coffee for you that is also good. With him you are free to be yourself, because he is simply a free man, even if this freedom must necessarily cost him a continuous inner swing that is difficult to identify initially, to try to adapt to a world that perhaps goes fast, asks too much, is often blind to the beauty of little things: it simply tiring. And so, I realize that it is almost evening but after a few days, I come back again and he welcomes me again with his smile, like if was waiting for this visit. Something magical was born between us, a friendship, and at that point photographing him became our new language, it marks the steps of our closeness, marks the words we say to each other and those that are silent but captured by my lens. The beginning of what I call a journey coincided with my decision to undertake an individual path of psycho¬therapy, when I chose to question myself leaving my comfort zone. Thus, while I reached my inner areas with awareness, inner places of Giancarlo were revealed; then I discovered a sensitive man, with his simple life, marked by interior rhythms and free from the conventions of modernity. An artist who uses his creations to express fears, critical issues but also to affirm his opinions. Giancarlo is suffering from a disabling psychiatric pathology which makes relationships with others, contact with himself and the world around him very difficult. Coming to terms with his loneliness, I wanted to tell it and highlight how often invisible and silent suffering is hidden in discomfort.