Your parents are both photographers. Can you see any similarities between you and them, either in the images you create or the way you approach photography?

Well, not really. My father was a fashion photographer and my mother was an animal photographer, the subjects ranging from cats to frogs. So very different subjects from the ones I approach. But surely it had an influence because I started assisting my mother when I was about 8 years old. My task was to make the dogs look in certain directions or just to hold them still. My mother was also one of the first people to have a film scanner and a computer, which was not so common in the mid-90s. After I had grown into a teenager, I wanted to do exactly the opposite of what my parents were doing, so I started working in a music venue with my uncle. So in a sense, in the beginning, it had sort of a reversed influence where I would try to stray as far away as possible from photography… classic rebellion against your parents. But the influence lingered on and resurfaced years later.

Aside from your parents, who or what were some of your other creative influences early on?

My early influences had not much to do with photography but much more with the weird and bizarre in general. Around age 10, I developed a passion for cryptozoology, the study of unknown, legendary, or extinct animals. Common examples are the Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster. I would get completely immersed in books on the subject, which were quite hard to come by in Italy. My dream at the time was to travel to the far regions of the world investigating these creatures.

As this was in the 90s, other big influences included The X-Files TV series, which provided a melting pot of ufology, conspiracy theories, and weird fiction. Fox Mulder’s iconic statement “The truth is out there” and the UFO poster in his office with the tagline “I want to believe” pretty much exemplify my initial approach to certain subjects related to folklore and belief.

In this sense, my father was a big influence on me, he showed me Alien by Ridley Scott when I was about 8 years old… while everyone else was watching The Lion King. He still is an avid consumer of sci-fi movies, and I surely owe him my imprint. When I started doing my own projects about 5 years ago, these influences that I thought were forgotten resurfaced in a very natural way. I understood that what I was interested in documenting with the photographic medium were just my passions and interests from that young age. But this was never planned, it just happened. It felt like opening a forgotten box in the cellar of your mind and realizing that it was always there, marking a continuum in my life. These passions were just in hibernation.

What about now? Where are you finding inspiration?

Nowadays I do a lot of research when I’m not working, by reading books or watching documentaries. Again, it’s just a flow of free association. I have a wide range of interests that sometimes make no sense together, but sometimes a wonderful synchronicity happens and you connect the dots between different worlds.

For example, in this book I cite the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who is, among other things, a futurologist. I got to know him because of his simulation theory (Matrix in a nutshell), but then I found out that he also wrote a paper regarding the impact of finding alien life in the universe, which fit perfectly with the subject of my book.

Also, I talk a lot with people I meet during my journeys. Sometimes someone will recommend that I travel to this or that country, and voilà: the next trip is already planned. I very much believe in the power of riding that wave of instinct and to trust the world around you. Sometimes it can be chaotic, but there is also a wonderful promise of getting in contact with realities that are completely unexpected. I guess it simply comes down to being open to the world. It’s a long-term Tetris game where the pieces don’t align in the first place, but just 3 or 4 years later they do. Probably the example that director Lynch (RIP) makes, when he says that if you want to catch the big ideas, you have to go swim in the deep water, that’s what he means.

What do you see as a defining moment from your journey as a photographer so far?

Probably the biggest turning point has been meeting my girlfriend Alice. She’s a director and shares my same passions. She’s always been on my side for most of my projects, and we also did a documentary together called In Light, on the rituals of a new religious movement in Bulgaria. Having somebody on your side who is a source of inspiration and with whom you spend entire evenings sharing the crazy new thing you discovered is a rare gift.

Did you have a specific religious or UFO-related experience that sparked the idea for The Great Filter? Where did your curiosity begin?

Regarding the UFOs, I never had any firsthand experience. But although it is safe to assume that they don’t exist, or at least are not alien spacecraft, they do have very significant importance in the modern landscape, as they represent a form of modern folklore. They can be seen as a natural evolution of fairies or gnome tales and as such hold a very important place in our society. As Jung would say, they represent a modern archetype of our collective subconscious.

They also represent a challenge to the materialism of our time, something that cannot be really measured or caught, except with the classic out-of-focus, blurry picture by a lucky witness in a rural part of the States. So if these things live only in our mind, they represent an alternative reality, a reality that lives in the psyche, which nonetheless can hold as much value as the material world.

The same can be said for religious ideas or experiences. I am agnostic but have had many “religious experiences” where I felt a deep connection with the world and an elevated plane of consciousness. This can happen during rituals or certain music.

So, to answer your question, probably some of the ideas came to me and not the other way around. In the beginning, the book’s focus was just on the folkloric aspect of ufology. But then one day, as we were driving on a highway in California, I saw a burning car on a lane. I stopped and took the picture. This would later spark the idea of connecting the book also to the environmental crisis and the possibility of human extinction.

In a second instance, we stopped by Mono Lake in California. It formed 1 million years ago and is one of the oldest lakes in North America. It looks like it’s from another world with its tufa formations and highly saline waters. I took a picture of a dead bird in it and just thought it looked eerie and beautiful. When doing the final edit for the book, scientists had just discovered a previously unknown microscopic organism in the lake, offering potential insights into the origins of complex animal life on Earth. This again related to the subject of my book.

I love the idea that the search for things far beyond us actually reveals things deep within us. What has working on this project revealed to you about yourself?

I guess that it spoke to me in many different ways. Firstly, I had to confront myself not just with documenting the subject pictorially but also with its deep conceptual ramifications. This required digging really deep into certain subjects I thought I knew but had to study to fully comprehend.

A good example of this is the birth of the Roswell crash meme. Countless books have been written on the subject, but not many know that there have been a few books written by the American Air Force themselves to analyze exactly what happened… spoiler alert, so I’m leaving this out. This was also the case for the work done by the SETI Institute, which is deeply grounded in astrophysics. Just the research for the text parts of the book took a year. And I found out that I really loved the process, sometimes to the point that I didn’t want it to end.

I understood that, for me, photography is not really an end in itself but an excuse to confront stories and get to know people that I otherwise would never be able to encounter.

Also, it gave me the opportunity to work together with some extremely gifted people, whereas my previous projects were one-man shows. The beautiful introductory article written by my good friend Noel David Nicolaus, founder of the Clusterduck Collective, has been an occasion to share “astral travels” with a person who shares my passions but with whom I had never had the chance to collaborate professionally.

In the end, this project, which has been my longest in the making, made me appreciate a different rhythm in doing projects. Ideas and inspirations need time to fully flourish. It is hard to do sometimes, especially because we live in an acceleration society, but the feeling of slowing down and letting go of this pressure is liberating and gives way to synchronicities.

What’s next for you? What’s one thing you’d like to accomplish this next year?

My girlfriend and I are working on a new documentary together, which I can’t say much about yet, but it will still revolve around a new religious movement. On my side, I have an ongoing project about Naraka, the buddhist version of hell. I’m still in the editing phase and don’t even know if it’s finished yet. Time, as usual, will tell…

What’s one thing you’d like to accomplish in your lifetime?

I don’t know really, sometimes it’s hard for me to have a narrative way of thinking about my life. I’m still surprised that I managed to do the things I’ve done in my past. And also, my idea of the future stops more or less one year from now: after that, it’s some sort of grey goo. Sometimes I feel like the Aymara, the Indigenous people of the Andes in South America, who invert the future and the past: the forward direction is what is known, what has been seen, the past. Behind them, where they can’t see, lies the future.

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