Marzio Emilio Villa Born in Brazil in 1987, Villa was adopted when he was three months old and grew up in Italy. After studying art in Milan, he moved to Paris when he was 23 years old. Influenced by his own story, Villa deals mainly with subjects such as identity, social structures and discrimination. Villa has been a member of the Hans Lucas Agency since February 2017. He lives and works in Paris.
ma rz i o em i l i ov i l la .co m LFI -O nl i n e .D E / B log : One Photo — One Story Equipment: Leica S006 with Summarit-
S 35 f/2.5 Asph, Leica M240 with Elmarit-M 28 f/2.8 Asph and Summicron-M 50 f/2
Muted colours, with a light touch of sepia – for many decades this is what photographs of shared family memories looked like. But what if those memories and the pictures connected to them are not real? What if the people that might have made up a particular family, never actually knew each other – as in the case of the photographer, Marzio Emilio Villa? Villa was three months old when he was adopted from Brazil by his Italian parents. He never knew his biological parents. He never tried to know who they were. Even so, it would seem as though he wanted to use photography to give form to this empty hole in his past, and so to create his own story. “For adopted children like myself and my brother, it is extremely important to establish family memories. The first part of your life, which you can only know about based on whatever your parents tell you, is simply non-existent. For me it’s a riddle, that I’ll never be able to solve,” Villa says. He was already in his early thirties by the time he finally returned to the place where he and his brother were born: Curitiba, a Brazilian city with a population of millions. Villa found it was a place where people looked like him, and spoke to him in Portuguese – a language that he did not master. Though to some degree Villa had gone in search of home, he soon realised that he would not find it there. Even so, he went looking for clues, both for himself and for his brother, who had been adopted a couple of years later when he was already five years old. “My parents had kept a box full of souvenirs, clothes and photos of my brother’s. In this box I also found a diary with addresses, that I needed for my project. Thirty-two years would pass before I had the courage to open it,” the photographer explains. So Villa visited the place he had come from: the area around the orphanage where he spent a month waiting to be adopted (page 54/55), the apartment blocks in Curitiba, where he might have grown up (page 53, above), the path to the orphanage his brother came
from (page 53, bottom right). Sparse areas, where the lack of people is in almost painful evidence: there are no children playing around on the streets, no passers-by. It is as though this city of millions has died out. There is nothing to hold on to, the eye bounces off every surface. It all seems pointless, just like the attempt to bring memories of the past to life. In addition to Brazil, Villa took photographs in Italy as well as Paris; however the pictures are also devoid of people who might give meaning to whatever is happening in the various locations. The primary school in northern Italy disappears into the mist (page 63, above), the mother’s garden is inhabited only by clay birds (page 63, below), and two empty chairs stand at the restaurant table where the photographer met his mother after returning from Brazil. It is as though the lives of the protagonists have gone missing. “I often feel like an observer in my own life. That’s exactly why I started photographing my family,” Villa remembers on the occasion of the opening of his exhibition in Paris. In his portraits, Villa tries to draw closer, both inwardly and outwardly, to the people in his extended family. These are not typical family portraits: each picture seems to express a complex relationship. As though something unmentionable has happened. Eyes turned away, eyes closed, the people appearing shameful, despondent. For the portraits, the photographer was inspired by paintings – especially the Flemish masters. “I am much more oriented towards painting and sculpture than towards photography,” the former art student explains. “For me it’s about creating something that reaches beyond reality.” A central image of the series is the portrait of his brother with his newborn son. It summarises the essence of the story, and builds a bridge between the past and the future with seemingly little effort. Denise Klink
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