¿Dónde está Florencia? / Where is Florencia?
I moved to Florence Italy in October 2023. It is the first time in my 32 years of life that I live in a city that receives a large number of short-term visitors (about 30,000 tourists per day). The city centre is full of people who come, stay for two to four days and leave. The streets are full of guided groups, all wearing their headphones listening to the explanations and all doing the same things. In my first month here I was surprised to notice that at 7am on any given day I was woken up by the roar of carry on suitcases rolling down my street.
The idea for this series started as a big question: why do so many people come to this city to do exactly the same thing? The same museums, the same streets, always queuing in the same shops or restaurants. Then I realised that I hadn't met a single ‘Florentine’ for three months. Where is Florence? is a question for the local, where is this city hiding behind the tourist tide that floods it every day, what is Florentine. And it is also a question about me, where am I in this game, how do I differentiate myself from the tourists or why I am not just another tourist, what differentiates me from the locals.
In this sense, the title of the project is a play on words, the question about the city and myself in it. In these self-portraits I will not be the protagonist but I will be ‘mimicked’ in the environment’. Inspired by the children's game Where's Wally?
