Villa Borghese, Winter

Villa Borghese in winter is a city of absence. The gardens hold the memory of their summer abundance but offer only silence, the paths are gravel and footsteps, the statues patient and grey, the air carrying the particular cold of December afternoons in Rome. The umbrella pines stand enormous and still, and if you listen, you can hear the old quiet that lives in places people have been walking through for centuries.

Michele arrived with his Rolleiflex and a measured handful of film. We had no plan beyond wandering. This was not a photo shoot in any deliberate sense. It was simply an afternoon when he wanted to see what the camera might find, and I wanted to bring the sape into the gardens and let it breathe in a new place.

We walked slowly, and he moved differently than most people do. There was a deliberation in his pace, a kind of listening. When he saw something that interested him, a path, a piece of light, the way the building held the winter sky, he would stop and look. Not at me, but around me. I understood that I was meant to move, to carry the sape through the space he was watching. Not to pose. To inhabit.

Shooting on film changes everything. There is no rushing. He carried only a few rolls, and that constraint meant every frame mattered. There was time between exposures, moments when we simply stood in the cold air and the light. The pace of it was meditative. He would raise the camera, frame something, lower it again. Look. Wait. The camera itself was a form of attention.

At some point I began to move with the sape, and the movement was not choreographed. The instrument and I were learning each other still, we had only recently met. But something about that afternoon, that light, that place, made it possible to move together without thinking. Michele circled me, crouching low, rising, waiting. He was looking for the moment when the instrument and I were not separate things. When the sape was not being held but was being inhabited.

There is a quality in these motion-blur photographs that I did not create consciously. The blur was not an accident, but neither was it deliberate. It emerged from the collaboration: my body moving with the instrument, Michele moving around us both, the film capturing something that lived in the space between intention and discovery.

Later we found the tree near the edge of the gardens. It was ancient, still living but opened by time, its trunk hollow enough to stand inside. The bark was rough and dark, and stepping into that hollow felt like entering something older than deliberate memory, a physical threshold into a different kind of space. The light came differently there, softer, more inward. Michele worked more quietly with the camera, and I could not see what he was framing. I was inside the tree, my hands on the bark, the sape close to my body, and the feeling was less like being photographed and more like being received.

The black-and-white photographs from that hollow are dreamlike because the space itself was dreamlike. They feel less like portraits and more like evidence of an encounter, between a body and wood, between time and the present moment, between the instrument and whatever that tree had been holding inside itself for decades.

Looking at these photographs now, I realise they were taken before I knew how important the sape would become. I thought I was carrying an instrument through a winter garden. Michele's camera saw something else. It saw the moment when the sape stopped being something I was holding and quietly began becoming part of who I was.