Site specific exhibition in Ferrara

Ferrara, Italy. 2021

October 17, 2021

Riaperture Festival
San Paolo Churc, Ferrara, Italy
September / October 2021

At the moment when the coronavirus was ripping through northern Italy, Fabio Bucciarelli gained exclusive access to the Red Cross workers who were going door to door around Bergamo, the hardest-hit part of Italy’s hardest-hit region, to check on those who were infected and take the worst of them to the hospital. It was a devastatingly intimate view of the way the coronavirus was tearing apart family after family in the close-knit region. Working cautiously in goggles, gloves, and respirator and clothed in a hazmat suit, Bucciarelli traveled with the workers in the ambulance and entered the bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens of families ravaged by the virus. The simple surroundings he encountered belied the significance of what Bergamo had become: at that time, ground zero for the coronavirus in all the world.

When the children said good-bye to mothers, fathers, and grandparents who were hoisted onto dollies and taken away, no one could know if it was for the last time.

Bucciarelli’s intimate work did not end at the front door, however. He entered overwhelmed intensive care units and overcrowded hospital corridors lined with Covid-19 patients. His connection to the families was so intensive that, in the most tragic cases, they allowed him to follow them to cemeteries for the pared-down yet poignant ceremonies that only the closest relatives could attend. Bucciarelli was among them.

©Fabio Bucciarelli for The New York Times

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