Non sei più tornato


On the evening of October 29th, two criminal groups met to settle scores over some debts, which ended badly.
(“Latina Press”)

Two people died that night, one of them was my father. I never knew what his real job was. On the night of the incident, I was waiting for him, but he never came home. I considered it normal not to see him return for a long time, just as I considered it normal to skip school to visit a prison and find him there. My father’s death was sudden and my family never talks about what happened. Even at the time it was never talked about. I grew up with many questions about him until ten years later I started to do research and explore the facts. I searched his records, found files, photos, letters from prison, and reconnected with people who bring back his memory.

The project combines images from the public and family archives and pictures of my personal memories taken in the present. Non sei più tornato (You never came back) is a collection of memories, events and facts that reveal through the eyes of a little girl the life choices of a father who was killed. It is a project that speaks of the end of a wait, but also of a broken hope, transformed into an unbridgeable emptiness that asks to be chasing. My father never came home, that is the centre of my project.

Project featured in Giovane Fotografia Italiana #12 | UNIRE / BRIDGING


BIO

Serena Radicioli

Serena Radicioli was born in Latina in 1997.
She graduated from the scientific high school in Latina, then she attended the two-year Officine Fotografiche in Rome and in 2020 she enrolled in the three-year degree program in photography and audiovisuals at RUFA (Rome University of Fine Arts), where she is currently attending the third year.

Serena Radicioli uses photography as a tool for exploration and investigation, taking an instinctive and complex approach. Her work crosses the aesthetics boundaries, leaving room for the errors of the photographic medium itself. The creative process starts from archive research and the reconstruction of a present reality intertwined with the past.

ursued her personal research with her thesis project Non sei più tornato (You never came back), with which he won the Castelfiorentino Arts Prize and the Musa Prize in 2023, and was a finalist in 2024 at the Arturo Ghergo Festival in the Young Talent section. The project participated in several exhibitions, including the Der Verzicht 2024 festival in Verona and the Biennial of Women’s Photography in Mantova, and was also published several times, including internationally, in the French newspaper “Libération”.