This project was shot on negative film between 1998 and 2005 all around Italy and in some other European countries. The images are a small edit from a huge archive, that tell my personal experience inside the Italian Rave Culture.
This work was buried in a drawer and after 15 years I decided that it was time to show it and prove that we were much more than a bunch of hotheads kids on drugs. I was a teenager looking for adventures and freedom, this is how I found myself at the sunset of the rave movement with a camera hanging on my neck. This is the story of my adopted family and a common dream of thousand of kids to live in a world under any rule or constriction. I spend 6 years of my life traveling to meet my friends in abandoned factories and isolated woods. Everything was possible, there were huge walls of speakers, streets made up with trucks. Just one rule: no selling and not consuming heroin. The music was omnipresent, even during the few hours of sleep, but nobody seemed to really mind it, it was simply there, it was the binder of everything. Everyone could be just himself, in that temporary home that was the dance floor where to prove that is possible to live in a different society. I still believe that, and after years while looking back, I can’t deny that that was the most free and full period of my life, but all that fairytale was saturated with asphalt and any kind of enemies, in the end it can’t avoid to face reality, that’s when a teenage dream crash in to wall. But for sure we all learned to not to kneel down but to fight for what is right.
