Unconventional South by Maria Angela Nestola
I was born in southern Italy, in Copertino, a village in the Salento area, the province of Lecce, Puglia; I insist on living there.
After I got my grammar school diploma and a degree in Communications, I started writing at a local newspaper about the language of cinema, literature and media.
During my lectureship in Psycho-pedagogy, I received my first requests for collaboration with agencies, public and private groups and so I dealt with the spread of artistic and sociocultural elements, both in analogue and in digital form.
Without really believing in it too much, I started taking pictures in August 2017, at the end of a holiday in Albania, during which I met unconventional teachers throughout my journey. Driven by the urgency of choosing what to keep and what to discard in my life, I found myself giving shape and direction to this thought with the help of photography. What do I focus on? What do I distance myself from? What do I want to keep? What do I want to discard? What do I want to make last? What do I want to burn out?
Unconventional South is the result of a year of turns of events that took place in and around Puglia, Sicily and Basilicata. A personal praise to the unconscious beauty that is typical of the people and the out-of-the-ordinary places that often hold precious secrets for an extraordinary evolution.
Maria Angela Nestola is an Italian photographer