Bio

Elisabetta Cociani was born in Spilimbergo (PN, Italy) in 1972. She lived in Peschiera del Garda (VR) until 1991 and then she moved to Milan where she graduated in Architecture at the Politecnico University. She studied photography at the CFP Bauer. She took part in two collective photographic projects, published in two books dedicated to photography about Milan. In September 2009 she founded MICRO, a photographers’ collective, with Arianna Sanesi and Andrea Boscardin. She still lives in Milan where she actually works as a free lance.

Statement

I wasn’t born in Veneto and neither were my parents. Due to my father’s job we moved to Peschiera del Garda in the Province of Verona when I was three. Until the age of nineteen, when I decided to move to Milan to study, I lived in this region. I have a strange relationship with this place, love and hate together, there are some people who are dear to me, who still live there, my parents and my sister above all and a few friends, therefore I sometimes go back there. The first few days I am very happy, I enjoy everything, having long walks, drinking glasses of white wine at the bar, the food, the evenings spent with my parents’ neighbours, chatting with my childhood friends…after a while a start feeling awkward, a bit out of place. I start feeling as I used to when I was a teenager: the need to seek another dimension. The fact that my parents were not born there influenced my feelings a lot. I lived there, I spent some wonderful years there, actually Veneto is very beautiful even if it is not very well known, but I knew that sooner or later I would have left. On one hand this land appeals me, I sometimes feel like moving back there to live, on the other hand when I am there for too long I feel I have to run away.