In 2003 I started working on a personal project about immigration in Italy, in collaboration with two friends and colleagues: Aldo Sodoma and Matteo Danesin. With the support of Culture Departments of the two cities of  Verona and Padova, we worked for almost three years with the aim to show the real life of a Nigerian and Ghanaian Pentecostal community.

The show, Portraits in Black, was accompanied by a catalogue showing our images and three essays about photography, pentecostalism, immigration. Three years later, thanks to Prof. Annalisa Butticci – a scholar of the Sociology Department of Padova University, working with Prof. Enzo Pace – the book landed on the desk of Prof. Awam Amkpa, teaching Theatre at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; at that time he was working with Annalisa and others on a project called They won’t budge, a show about African Diaspora in Europe, which opened in New York in 2009.

A few months later Prof. Amkpa invited me to be part of the team that is working in Nigeria to start a new university, connected to NYU: the Kwara State University in Malete, Ilorin.

That’s it!

Now I’m here. I arrived on 19 april, assigned to introduce between 10 and 20 students to the celestial pleasures of photography. And also, at the same time, I’ve been given the freedom to produce whatever I think could be interesting and useful to explore and promote Nigerian culture, here and abroad.

So, I’m the Visiting Professor Marco Ambrosi; I’ll spend six weeks between April and May and will be back between September and December.

Glad to tell you short and simple stories about my African discoveries.

o