Michela Battaglia (1982) is a former young woman, born and raised by the sea in Mondello (Palermo), amid Mafia killings and a parallel childhood.
It’s a shame — such a sharp mind; she could have done so much more.
She grows bitter at history’s recurring mistakes, wasted opportunities, the lack of care for detail — and the apostrophe where there should be an accent.
If she’d been born a billboard, today she’d be an influencer or content creator – but she doesn’t quite have the physique du rôle, not even to be her own marketing director.
She’s an artisan acrobat. She tries not to lose her balance or the tactile dimension of things. To keep her idle high.
She brings curiosity and seriousness to her nature and passions. Her work explores the themes of memory, love, death, and absence, each approached from different perspectives.
After earning a Classical high school diploma and a Master’s Degree in Modern Philology from the University of Palermo (2008), she went on to pursue two postgraduate programs in photography: Photography and Visual Design at NABA and FORMA in Milan (2009), and the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism One-Year Certificate Program at ICP in New York City (2014). She has moved approximately twenty times. She has published three books — Storie di Mafia, Babel, and Carissimo Iosif — and her work has been featured in several exhibitions.
To get by — somewhere between a sense of defeat and rare bursts of optimism — she works in a call center. Inbound, but still a call center. She doesn’t love it, but it gives her a certain peace of mind and creative freedom. She once dreamed of doing radio; instead, she ended up talking on the phone. Or, as a child once put it: from “photographist” to “telephonist.”
She can’t tell the power company, “Sorry, there’s no budget.” Freedom has a price — one she pays, always, with affection.
Provider of gin and tonics at improbable hours. Accomplished procrastinator. She mostly survives on Kinder Buenos and canned tuna.
In the morning, she dances in her pajamas around the kitchen. She’d have a fried calzone for breakfast, but in the end settles for a three-cup moka pot.
She avoids social media, keeps Twitter only as a source of information, and refuses to call it “X.”
She cultivates the talent for “growing old without becoming an adult.”
She lives in Milan, even though there’s no sea.