Caleido tells the Travel diary of Arnaldo Abba, portrait and travel photographer. Welcome to Caleido, an inspirational diary, that narrates many stories: about creative people, trends, travels, objects. / Read the Editor’s letter here
Diary of: @arnaldoabba
1. If you were to write a Travel diary from your “trip” to Milan, what would your title be? What does this title mean to you?
“200 Metri da casa” is the title of a project I developed during the first quarantine for Covid-19 in April 2020, and is named after the government’s ordinance limiting travel from one’s home to situations of necessity and not beyond a radius of 200 meters. The cloistered air of our homes also permeated the streets, the atmosphere was dense still and silent as if in a dream. It was a static and mysterious world, almost metaphysical of sculpted lights and shadows confined in abstract geometries. This led me to reconsider with a new vision these ordinary and familiar places to which we normally do not pay attention, to snatch them from our “tired” inattention, and to give them a new life.
Ph. Arnaldo Abba
2. If at this moment, from your “trip” to Milan, you were to send a postcard, to whom would you send it? What message would you write?
I would like this postcard to be received by my children, now adults, masters of a new world, green, clean, on a human scale. A world that thanks to this 2020 we have begun to create responsibly, united, abandoning waste and the superfluous. I would like it to be the memory of a moment thanks to which we have begun to change, and not just a painful moment for many: “You have to fall to know how to get back up”.
3. What is one of your objects that will remind you of this “journey”? What is the memory related to it? Can you send us a photo taken by you?
More than an object, it will be these images that will remind me in the future what my Milanese neighborhood was like at this particular time. Already once when I lived in the United States before leaving I had photographed the surroundings of my home in Santa Barbara, to remember them and carry them with me always. Although we take some of the places in our daily lives for granted, I believe that, with physical distance and time, some of these places will be lost: photographing them is a way for me to save them, to make them mine.
