Gigi Ghirotti

The initial request is for an estimate on a very simple production: conducting a few interviews in the form of video testimonials, similar to what other organisations have done to share their stories through the voices of their service users. My task would have been to provide modest technical skills along with the appropriate equipment to light the subjects, record their voices, and capture close-ups.

I decline and make a counter-proposal: the project should be longer and more refined, carried out voluntarily and with an authorial approach, but above all, it should take a different direction. No glaring lights, no microphone setups, no staged sets—just a spontaneous conversation. The presence and role of Andrea, then Coordinator of volunteer home care services and now Board member, immediately proves to be essential.

We begin with an initial round of meetings, designed and proposed to allow natural conversations, an exchange of experiences, and the chance to hear the stories of the key participants in this project: caregivers who have accompanied their loved ones through the final stages of illness and, ultimately, life. During these meetings, I take extensive notes and study them carefully once back in the studio.
What emerges from their stories? Emotions, personalities, the character and traits of those speaking and those who are no longer there, as well as the simplest, most everyday things: places, objects, and routine situations.

The initial goal becomes clearer. We need to tell a story for those who are not yet familiar with Gigi Ghirotti, to share the journey the Foundation takes alongside individuals with critical illnesses and their families. We need to foster awareness, spread knowledge, and break down indifference and stereotypes.

The second meeting with the five caregivers selected by the Foundation (many are surprised we haven’t started filming earlier) takes place with a video camera and a small microphone—minimal equipment that has already been announced to each participant in the prior meeting. We revisit the topics already discussed, maintaining the same conversational approach, while Andrea and I make sure to highlight the most relevant testimonials for the narrative we have set out to create. There is no censorship or omission, only an effort to “stay on topic.”

The footage is recorded. The testimonials of Donatella, Emilia, Federica, Gino, and Roberto are invaluable, but the goal still feels far away. Despite my attempts to prepare by reading books and watching videos about Gigi Ghirotti and similar organisations, as well as palliative care and pain management, I realise I need to step back and work alongside someone who can craft the story we need to tell. I think of Federica and, after proposing the collaboration to the Foundation, I invite her to join the project, to listen to the five testimonials and develop a narrative thread that ties them together.

Matteo

I’m involved in the project perhaps because I am an anthropologist specialising in the anthropology of health, or perhaps because of my poetic vision of relationality. From the outset, the project reveals itself to be complex—not only because of the subject matter and the variety of perspectives brought by the participants, but also because of the profound emotional intensity in every face, every word, every concept expressed.

Each caregiver, even in seemingly colder or less involved words, conveys the immense “pull” of the whirlwind of thoughts, actions, worries, and planning they have experienced. Such clarity and lucidity in describing these experiences could only come from time, space, and emotional processing… How can we give these stories of individual, familial, and collective transformation the proper space, the right dimension, and the appropriate balance between the personal journey and the universal human experience? How can we help those who might read or hear these accounts grasp the many layers of experience that revolve constantly around the end of life and the unnameable presence of death?

The poetic and narrative solution emerges through the settings and landscapes of these interviews. The backdrops participate alongside us, reflecting rhythms and cycles far greater than ourselves, situating our experiences as fragments of a much larger story: nature and its seasons.

As my guide and inspiration, I turn without hesitation to the wisdom of the Yijing.
The renowned and esteemed Classic of Changes becomes an invaluable poetic source and a masterpiece that examines in detail the rhythms of the Heaven-Earth, as well as the theme of relationships in their broadest, archetypal, and most everyday forms. Specifically, drawing on the foundational coordinates of the hexagrams associated with the 12 months of the year, I develop a narrative proposal that I share and refine with my companion on this journey, Matteo.

Federica
(linkedin – sito web – linktr.ee)