It started one night in March eight years ago under a heavy rain storm. We traveled by car at a walking pace without being able to see much, due to the amount of rain coming down. I turned to look towards the fields and a line of four Indian people on bicycles proceeded slowly towards home. From the following day I started to slow down every time I passed somebody on a bicycle in the car to meet their eyes in the rearview mirror, and I began to think about how to tell the story of the Punjab migrants together with that of the first migrants who came from Northern Italy. In a short time I came into contact with dozens of Indian men and women and went to look for those few Italians still alive who arrived in the early 1900s to learn about their stories, then those of their children and grandchildren. I made almost two hundred portraits over the span of a summer. Afterwards I went to the Bella Farnia residence, a kind of Indian ghetto on the coast where I met a group of children for whom I decided to hold a free photography course during the summer. After a few days they became valuable assistants and translators with all of the adult Indian people who, despite having lived here for decades, still do not know Italian. Mandeep, Daranprit, Savitan… it is to these children who have become adults that this work is dedicated. The realisation of the book was possible thanks to a crowdfunding campaign that saw the support of 182 people from 10 different countries around the world. The ultimate goal of the project was the creation of a free three-year photography and writing workshop for Indian children in a middle school in Sabaudia.
Fillipo Trojano is a photographer, photography teacher, actor and author. He became a professional photographer at the end of high school, worked for three years in a fine art darkroom, and in 2009 began the long-term project Portraits of Mari. He was also the lead actor in the film Tickets by Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi. He has been teaching photography since 2001 and has been a lecturer in a psychiatric community for four years. He recently published the volume Mandeep and Other Short Stories and is currently carrying out the La Vela project on Santiago Calatrava's unfinished swimming stadium which intertwines photography and illustration.