Log in to hire mariela
Public Project
HOME
Copyright Mariela Sancari 2024
Updated Apr 2011
Topics Art, Documentary

“Home” is an ongoing project on the people living close to my mother’s house in Abasto, a little town in Argentina. These people have been our neighbours for a long time, since I was a child but only now, after many years living in another country, I come back and see them with a different light. I see them as extra-ordinary characters.

 Ernesto with his 1800 lb. bull named Jacinto, Berta and her husband  swimming “their own style” in the pool, Luis “the handyman” with his bike, Maria Luisa devoted to the argentinian president with a Penguin statue on his honor…

 With my eyes clear from the distance and time spent in another place, I see their uniqueness, of which they are not aware, and identify myself in the way they are and live, going further in the understanding of myself and my identity, many times so uncertain being a foreigner abroad and having to get used to other traditions and ways of being.

 These portraits are a way of reconnecting myself with my roots and I do it in such a way that I try to reinterpret my identity in a poetic way, photographing my neighbours as they are but trying to stand out their warmth, uniqueness, loneliness…all so familiar and unnoticed once in the past and now so fascinating and distant to me.

 Instead of taking close up portraits of them, I get close by having a wider view, letting the space help me tell the story of who they are.

2,456