The project Pietre d’inciampo (Stolpersteine, stumbling stones) was inspired by the recent celebration

of the giorno della memoria in Italy, and by the war of Israel against Hamas in Gaza, which has

turned into a genocide. A recent call for a photography show, Lieu-Non Lieu / I non luoghi della mente

led me to think of le pietre d’inciampo as an exemplary encounter of lieu and non-lieu. The stones are

themselves concrete and specific places,the only reconstructions of the real places where Jews lived

before their deportation to the non-place by definition, the German lager. A rereading of Primo Levi

reminded me that the Nazis not only exterminated Jews, homosexuals, Roma, and political

opponents en masse, at times swiftly and at other times slowly, but created an alternative world,

where values, moral principles,and human behavior were turned upside down. In that world the

prisoners’ only hope of survival lay in conforming to that inversion, while waiting for their final

transfer to the crematory. The stones thus embody the not-being-in-any-place of the victims, except

for their being-in-our-memory.

I took the images you see here in 2025 in Turin, where I live.