Project 24
[Project 24] was born out of a simple idea: taking portraits, deeply connecting with people in front of my camera, working together with a person to create a story to tell, these are my favorite things in the world, it was just a matter of time before I found myself asking : since I love it so much, would I be able to do it non stop for 24 hours consecutively?
Would I be able to create for a whole day, without stops, breaks, rests? Push my body and mind over the edge and fuel them with my creativity alone?
As soon as I set my mind on it, I called the only person I know that would be up for such a crazy challenge: good thing such person happened to also be the most talented and creative make up artist I have ever worked with, Ollie Savage.
She didn’t even let me explain the whole thing: “Yes, let’s do it!”
And so we started: casting, sketching, developing concepts for each of the 24 photoshoots and creating mood boards. During the pre-production process, we met the guys at Warehouse 100. They liked the project and decided to let us use their studio for the project.
We set a date : we’d start on Nov 13th at 10am and never stop shooting until Nov 14th at 10am.
A couple of coffees later, JD Lakhiani from StageWolf Productions saw something interesting in our crazy project, and decided to join in, providing his incredible skills and vision to film behind the scenes of the whole thing, while also creating a fashion film with the 24 amazing people casted.
A month prior to the project, everything seemed to be ready, set in stone.
But that didn’t last for long : on Oct 15th, my father called me from Italy to tell me he had been diagnosed with Acute Leukemia and that he needed a bone marrow transplant.
And straight away, all the bold, colorful images that were dancing through my head for the project, started to dissipate. A darker, colder feeling washed over myself, and these anxious, nostalgic, fear-induced images started inhabiting my mind.
At first, I tried to ignore them, refuse their existence, suppress them, with little success.
It wasn’t until I asked the whole team if they were ok with revisiting the concepts and the mood boards, that I realized I had a great opportunity in front of me: to use art to fight my fears, to embrace my darker thought, exorcise them in photography, freeing myself while creating beauty from ashes.
And that’s how [Project 24] came to be.
