Davide Fecarotti - Roya
Born in Palermo in 1997, Davide Fecarotti decided to leave Sicily at the page of 19 to study photography at the École Supérieure des Arts de Saint-Luc Tournai in Belgium, where he obtained his degree this past June. He’s currently based in Arles, France, and will be embarking on his master’s degree at L’école Nationale de la Photo.
Davide finds inspiration in hidden stories that live in small bookshops, and spends his time leafing through books from Mack Books, Void, or Witti Kiwy editions to discover more of his current generation’s photography. Photographers such as Gregory Halpern, Adam Bromberg, Oliver Chanarin, and pioneers like Evelyn Hofer and Walker Evans continue to influence his practice.
His series Roya began in April 2020 when he and his professor followed the news of an exceptional storm that had hit and destroyed a large part of the territory. Roya is a 59 km long river that runs through France and Italy, divided between the Maritime Alps. The river rises in the mountains of Tende and flows into the Mediterranean Sea, the Ligurian Sea. In 2020, storm Alex brought heavy rain and cataclysmic flooding to the mountainous region of the Roya Valley. The flooding from the river destroyed buildings, bridges, roads, and isolated villages.
"Roya is transformed,” is one of the sentences that a man repeated to Davide before taking him to walk along the river bed. From Breil-sur-Roya to Tende, Davide wanted to walk along the river to observe its metamorphosis. Davide writes, “I wanted to understand how the masses of stone imposed themselves on my path, in an attempt to try to analyse them and give them another shape. The storm left scars in its path, the remains of houses, machinery and scrap metal that also imposed themselves, leaving a trace of the storm.” Davide was particularly attracted to the river’s hypnotizing pink and turquoise colours, and its rushing noise that filled the scenery. Sometimes, he would stop to look at its simple flow, reflecting on the position of man in relation to nature. Davide felt small as he sank to the river’s edge, “immersed in the mountains that made a magnetic sound, urging me to keep walking.”
In the whole series of images, Davide wanted to only focus on three figures who accompanied him on his during like Cahterine Gros, founder of Roya Citoyenne and a fundamental figure of his journey. Davide would spend the first hours of the morning and the last of the evening talking with Catherine about all her past projects, listening to her filled him up, he writes, “I knew that each time she tackled a new subject, my vision of the valley changed.”
Catherine Gros, along with other activists, has been a key figure in supporting the rights of migrants who, in previous years, have crossed the mountains in search of "Paris". With this in mind, Davide went out every day aware that like the river, the movement of the region was in constant flow. As he tried to dig deeper and deeper, he came across the issue of "bridge". During Davide’s journey, he was confronted with broken roads or collapsed bridges, which forced him to change direction or find another route to take. In turn, he started to question himself and documented this helplessness of "not being able to cross.” However, Davide was relieved when he was able to find other ways as he studied and followed the river. This feeling of reconstruction and inability to cross a bridge plagued Davide throughout his trip, in his final remark, Davide notes, “I would come home at night with swollen legs but looking at my photos I felt like I was reconstructing a small part of that river.”
