Isabella Borrelli

Over the bridge

Over the bridge is a work of street photography on Garbatella, a historic district of Rome. Its history is incredibly stratified: the name derives from "garbata" and "ostella", the one that according to the oral traditions was the innkeeper of the most frequented inn in the area, a pilgrimage destination to the Basilicata of Saints Peter and Paul. Garbatella was then the working-class par excellence, home to the power plants and the Roman gas pipelines, and now it is still being transformed thanks to the illegal artist Blue, who is literally redesigning the buildings of the neighbourhood that has become a destination for young people, who like a tribe of exodus, it moves between old and new in the ever-changing neighbourhood. The magic of redevelopment creates suburban areas of great complexity in the Italian fabric. Over the bridge was made in five nights: I worked from 7 pm to 4 am to be precise, to capture this new tribe that at night goes out in the streets of Garbatella to leave them, in the morning, empty of employees. In the work, however, I tell a lot about myself. At the time of shooting I had recently lost, unexpectedly, my father: the search through the streets of Garbatella has become a personal research work, where the visions of the suburbs have turned into hallucinations of wonder and abandonment, and the tribe that I pursued during the nights was perhaps the search for my roots, linked, like Garbatella, between past and future. this is an ongoing project