In My Roots, Alessandro Risuleo constructs a visual narrative that digs into the ancestral memory of the body. Far from any descriptive or biographical impulse, the project speaks through symbols, evocations, and stratifications. Once again, the body takes center stage—not as an aesthetic surface, but as a primordial site where stories, wounds, and invisible genealogies accumulate.
The image does not illustrate—it questions. The human form intertwines with natural or material elements—earth, sap, blood—as if identity were something that grows, branches out, is passed down. Risuleo uses photography to investigate what precedes form: the primal connection between human and nature, between the individual and their ancestors, between the present and what has always inhabited us.
There is no nostalgia in My Roots, but rather a kind of tension. Rootedness is not a refuge—it is an act of awareness. It is the realization that identity is not a sum of experiences, but a living knot of origins, relations, and resistances. The images seem to emerge from a mythological dream or a secular ritual in which the body becomes both relic and seed.
Risuleo invites us to consider our roots not as something that holds us back, but as a mobile structure—one that expands, that lives within the body and through the body. My Roots is a work about return, but also about transformation. A visual attempt to listen again to what has generated us, in order to continue being reborn.
