Photographer Fiora Garenzi has created a deeply personal photographic series titled "Nanna Strana," exploring her complex relationship with Corsica, the island where she lived from age 8 to 18. The series, which won the prestigious Laurent Troude Grant, is currently on display at Galerie Vu in Paris through September 27, 2025.
Garenzi began working on "Nanna Strana" in 2023, driven by a painful question that had long haunted her: "Where is home for me?" This quest for belonging and identity forms the emotional core of her symbolic photographic work, which captures both the physical landscape of northern Corsica and the photographer's internal journey toward understanding her place in the world.
The artist's connection to Corsica began when she was just eight years old. As she recalls, "One day, my mother sat me in the back seat of the dark blue 206 that I had always known, with the dog at my feet, and we hit the road together." They left the Parisian suburbs, boarded a ferry, and "started everything over again somewhere in the Mediterranean." She explains that "it was complicated at the time, everything was complicated, and going to the sunshine was sure to make things less complicated."
Garenzi grew up in a village in northern Corsica, at the southern tip of the cape. She left the island at 18 with "a big bag on my back, a small bag on my chest," noting how "it's strange how everything you own can be summed up in so little." For years afterward, she had little desire to return, struggling with the fundamental question of what defines a home.
"I've always had trouble feeling at home, in all the homes where I've lived," Garenzi reflects. "Poets say that homes are people; others, more pragmatic, say they are four familiar walls and a roof." This ongoing struggle with belonging eventually compelled her to seek answers through her photography, particularly because "there were too many other unanswered questions in my head. I needed to find an answer to at least one of them."
In Corsican culture, Garenzi explains, questions of identity run particularly deep. "In Corsica, knowing who you are, which place you belong to, which history, a little more fatally than elsewhere I believe, is inherent to your construction." She notes that "family heritage is passed down from generation to generation. We are very attached to the elders and to places." However, as a teenager, her family consisted only of her mother, and family history was "a painful subject."
Despite initially thinking that understanding her family's reasons would fill a void within her, Garenzi discovered that "when I knew, the void was still there." This realization led her to make a conscious decision about home: "So, my home, I decided it would be there. Not because I felt particularly in my place there, but simply because I couldn't remember any other place."
The photographer's relationship with memory plays a crucial role in her work. "I had no memories of before, and the years after, I had spent them with a bag on my back," she explains. "So my home, it had to be there." Additionally, there were "two people on the island who mattered, two reasons to come back. That was enough."
The exhibition at Galerie Vu, located at 60 Avenue de Saxe in Paris, showcases Garenzi's symbolic approach to photographing the Corsican landscape and her personal connection to it. Through her lens, she captures not just the physical beauty of the island but also the complex emotions and memories associated with her formative years there. The series represents both a homecoming and a coming-to-terms with the fluid nature of identity and belonging in contemporary life.
