Maria Di Stefano, This is us, 2021

This Is Us is a photographic project conceived by Italian multimedia artist Maria Di Stefano, curated by Veronica He. Thirty unpublished portraits tell the story of the city and reveal themselves in it: the protagonists are adolescent girls and boys, born or raised in Italy by parents from different backgrounds.

The project wants to give a voice and a face to their bureaucratic limbo – they can only apply for Italian citizenship when they reach the age of majority – publicly affirming the complexity and richness of their individual heritage. An expositive gesture that replaces the advertising message with an equally contemporary emblem of our society, aesthetically reactivating these places scattered throughout the city. The poster becomes a statement and is transformed into a new dimension of encounter and relationship, with the other, with another face of the city, even with ourselves, who are the actors of the gaze and the object of that of the girls photographed.