Driven by an obsession with understanding the meaning of birth, I photograph everything connected to my own origins and those of my family. I seek meaning, an impossible order, a way of holding on to the people I love. I was born from the love between two people, yet within that same place emerged my first experience of abandonment a feeling that seems to echo relentlessly throughout my family history. Why do we create, and at the same time destroy? This book is conceived as a celebration of life, an attempt to break inherited cycles. The project unfolds like a fragmented memory, moving freely from one place to another. I want the names of people and locations to disappear. What matters are behaviors, gestures, and emotional patterns passed from one generation to the next, alongside the universal events that shape every life: birth, emotional separation, and death. *"I spent most of my days in the garden of our country house. I loved sinking my hands into the earth, mixing it with water until it became mud, then covering my body with it just so my mother would spray me clean with the garden hose. My next-door neighbor my closest friend was seven years old, just like me. We were always looking up at the sky, counting airplane trails, watching the trees to see when our favorite fruit would ripen, and, after the rain, waiting for rainbows to appear. Around dinner time, my father would finally come home. I would spend the whole evening flying airplanes with him he made me feel as though I could soar through the sky. Sometimes we played with plastic toy guns that shot tiny colored paper pellets, and whenever he hit me, I would fall to the ground pretending to be dead. I was so convincing that he almost believed me. On nights before school holidays, we stayed awake for hours waiting for shooting stars so we could make wishes, or hoping to spot a passing UFO. Whenever we had to go into town, we climbed aboard our beautiful yellow spaceship. One day we took our giant spaceship and never returned home we stayed in the city forever. My mother stopped spraying me with the garden hose. The spaceship had long since become an ordinary car; the colored paper pellets had turned into sheets of paper filled with responsibilities; and the UFOs in the sky had become nothing more than shooting stars on which we quietly placed our wishes."