In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorái. To go to work or come home, one takes a “metaphor”, a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.

M. de Certeau _ The practice of everyday life

In a world ruled by solutionism we interpret the Way as the shortest direct line from point A to point B. This passive way of relating to space is countered by interest (from Latin interesse, inter- ‘between’ + esse ‘be’) in its meaning of ‘participating’ in the soul of places so that we acquire awareness of the road we travel.

Non può essere solo treno is the memory of a journey with an Interrail pass that took place ten years ago. Three teenagers after graduating from high school travelled ten thousand kilometres without any premeditated plan from Porto to Thessaloniki, where what mattered was going and fuelling the curiosity of discovering Europe.

Ten years later, the images of this journey reappear in the mind, as if seen from the window of a carriage, and call us to retrace and listen to the places we cross every day. Seen from this perspective, the train is no longer just a means for reaching a destination, but becomes itself a travelling place and a container of stories.

This photographic narrative suggests an alternative path that aims to rethink the coordinates and categories of our dialogue with places, in a process of redefining our relationship with them: as people walk through space, inhabit it, travel through it, exploit it, space becomes a place.

text by Marta Blanchietti and Eleonora Da Col