Filippo Romano, WATERTANKS MATHARE, NAIROBI, 2019

Water Tanks Mathare” is a project started in 2012 on the water distribution system in the ghettos of the Kenyan capital. Mathare Valley is a ghetto where about 600,000 people live. It was born as an agglomeration of informal settlements that arose in an area that was originally the great quarry from which the stone was extracted to build the downtown of Nairobi. The water is not free of charge and its sale is outsourced to private individuals who sell it at an increased price according to the trends of the free market and the situation of the water supply. The theme is central to the tale of the geopolitical ghettos and the concrete houses, photographed as similar types, are the terminal point of the water pipes brought into the ghetto by the city. I have worked on elements that in the chaos of the urban landscape of the ghetto repeat themselves as fixed points of a geography perpetually in transformation and I have created a catalogue that is concretized in the pages of a school notebook that I have always taken with me.

Filippo Romano