love, sex and relationships is a collection of intimate conversations between me and others.
It is a video and photography documentation project that includes questions to myself, couples and individuals, who live or have lived in a relationship of love, sex and relationship mixed with photographs, reflections, thoughts, emotions and poems.
I collected 40 hours of interviews that I used to create a six-hour video documentation.
I then took black and white analogue photographs with a medium format camera, a Mamiya II 6x7.
After six years, the video and photography project of love, sex and relationships has become a book project, still in production co-curated with editor-curator Steve Bisson.
The project was born in London, before Brexit and Covid-19 while I was in a love relationship with my ex-boyfriend who then became violent. To get out of the pain-violence and the situation of helplessness and confusion, I went in search of couples and individuals with whom to have intimate conversations about love. I interviewed 25 unknown people using a digital camera, a Canon 5D Mark III.
I went to visit them in their homes or wherever they wanted to meet me.
I then conducted the interviews and took the photographs on the same day inviting the couple or individual to represent themselves or their current relationship in a photograph.
I wanted to explore what it meant to others, to be in a relationship. I wanted to understand how much each of them could love themselves.
Photography and video documentation also become a journey of self-observation, discovery and awareness and in the long term therapeutic.
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PEOPLE INTERVIEWED
Filiz, single mother
Ganga, divorced after ten years of marriage
Gill and Richard, married for thirty years
Giulia and Edwin, together for 18 years, married for 4
Esperanza, married for 30 years, separated with a daughter
Agnese and Virginia, married for two years
James and Joakim, in a loving relationship
Toni King, single, divorced, with a teen that he can’t see
Robert and Sarah, married for 30 years, with three children
Chris, single
Wen Wei and Valeria, getting married soon after six months of engagement
Giulia and Diana, in a relationship for two years
Robin and Paola, married for four years
Mum and Dad, married for 45 years with four children
Each video has a duration ranging from 25 to 50 minutes, for a total of almost 6 hours.
The video documentation is recorded in London. English language with English subtitles.
English subtitles are transcribed by me with the collaboration of Jonathan Graham, an English teacher.