THEthe desert is ocher colouredthanks to the light that absorbs the earth and mixes it with the air in an invisible vortex and returns everything illuminated. Yellow like the sun, red like the earth, dark like the shadowthis landscape of dunes and expanses, people, cars and things is magically wrapped in primordial purity. How the earth was before us, how perhaps it will be when we stop offending it.
A Warm Winter (A warm winter) by Martina Albertazzi it’s a trip to the California desert. An intimate diary in which the author documents the experience of nomadism and motherhood with visual fragments, fusing humans and landscape in photographic light.
Martina and her daughter Nilde are the protagonists. Nilde was born here, in the desert. The mother, Martina, is Italian but has lived in the USA for a long time. Father Conor is from Omaha, Nebraska. A few years ago, in the wake of Chloé Zhao’s film Nomadland, based on the book by Jessica Bruder, they bought a van to travel in the desert. A choice of life and freedom or perhaps just an experience that Martina tells us, confessing that it doesn’t just happen in the film, it’s all true.
Martina Albertazzi, 42 years old, with little Nilde, known as Nilù, who will soon be 3 years old. Having left Rome to look for America, she will find it with her husband Conor, from Omaha, in the wake of Nomadland, the 2020 Oscar-winning film, an inspiration for those seeking another possible life in the primordial scenery of Yucca Valley, California.
Let’s start with his choice of American life.
I was born and raised in Rome. I graduated in law and immediately after I did a master’s degree in journalism with an internship at the University of Tor Vergata. I wanted to be a journalist, my passion for photography developed over time, even though I have always walked around with a Fuji in my bag. In 2008 I did an internship at Ansa in New York. Never was a worse period for the USA: the subprime crisis (high-risk financial loans) and the bursting of the real estate bubble gave rise to one of the worst recessions in Western history. We certainly weren’t bored. I was a novice, but fortunately they sent me around, I did everything: from fashion week to any type of protest.
She had thrown herself into journalism.
Who knows, maybe I could have, but after the internships, during a study holiday in Malta, I met Conor, an American from the Midwest, also a journalist, who was completing his semester in college. We fell in love and got married. We returned to New York together.
Then what happened?
Everyone followed their own path, me as a freelancer and him with various contracts, but when the assignment came for him from Chinese TV we took the opportunity and moved to China. I earned money teaching English and photographed for passion. After China Conor had the assignment in Turkey and the following year we also left the Bosphorus behind to return to the States, this time to Los Angeles, but it didn’t last long.
Why?
LA is a very expensive city, rents are prohibitive. In the meantime the pandemic had broken out, at that point it seemed to us that everything was aligning to suggest a radical change. We moved to Joshua Tree, at the gateway to the Californian desert. We knew the area, like many Angelenos, we spent a weekend there every now and then. Conor worked remotely for Naked Capitalism, a journalism site, we were free to travel.
At this point does the van come into the picture?
Yes. We started traveling in the desert with our van and I, fascinated by the film and the book NomadlandI started this long photographic project on the desert people. I was very fascinated by the humanity I met, people of all types: those who want to spend the winter in the heat, those who can no longer afford life in the city, those who love to travel and those who have retired and spent their severance pay to buy a van and finally there are the managers who work remotely and the homeless. This entire diverse community becomes your neighborhood. They are certainly nomads, but it is difficult to label them because they have different social backgrounds and different objectives. Obviously, as in the film, there is the portrayal of poverty and the escape from unbridled capitalism, but it is much more than that, it is truly a heterogeneous human panorama.
Nilù in her mother’s arms and near the entrance of the van. «She has the soul of an explorer. It’s changing quickly: the wild child who spent hours looking at the anthills of the desert covered in dust will soon be just a memory.”
Nilde arrived in this scenario.
More or less. I was going through a particular moment, I had lost my father. Until then I had never wanted motherhood, I didn’t feel this instinct, but I decided to try. Conor agreed. Nilde was born in Palm Springs Hospital, a flower of the desert.
How did it settle in?
Children could even live in a shoe box, they don’t ask for much, they just need to have their mother close to them, their source of support. For Nilde the camper is her home.
Do you have friends who share this life?
There are many families who live in campers and travel. When we stay in one place for long periods, often in Arizona, we park near other families who have now become our extended family: we watch each other’s children and the children play with each other. Nilde has never lacked sociality.
It looks like a scene from a movie.
We were nomads who spent the winters in the desert and in the summer, to escape the heat, we went east or north of the west coast. My priority was to photograph and experience that particular dimension of human landscape. Plus, I knew it was a timed life. Once the project was finished, we would have to make new decisions.
The view from Q Mountain at sunset. “Every time I want to see how many nomads leave or arrive at Quartzsite in Arizona and how many new camps have formed, I take a walk up this hill on the edge of the temporary city.”
Nomadism or sedentary lifestyle.
Exact. And the time has come. Nilde will soon be 3 years old, I don’t feel like home schooling, I prefer to go to school. We are thinking of stopping. We still don’t know where. I will often return to the desert for long periods because it is a place that still interests me a lot.
Nilde is the protagonist of the photographic work
I have never been interested in photographing things that are distant from me, both geographically and emotionally. I love traveling and obviously I would leave for Vietnam tomorrow, but I know I couldn’t talk about anything truly personal there. Portraying Nilde, within this project, was completely natural, perhaps also a way to understand what was happening to me, how my body was changing and how I was changing. I was a new person in front of another unknown person who was always with me. I started calling her Nilù, only I call her that, she really likes this. It’s growing at a rate that takes my breath away. I don’t know if this is something that happens to all mothers, but I’m learning about it and this is the most incredible, fun and scary aspect of the motherhood experience.