The travelling exhibition project 'Towards East' is an exhibition of paintings that tell the extraordinary story of my two-year solo overland journey to Asia. My aim is to create a travelling exhibition of my work in the West and in the East, particularly in the 15 countries I visited during my journey through Asia: Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Nepal and Pakistan.

Through the paintings and the organisation of participatory events, I will narrate my journey and invite the public to reflect on issues directly related to the experience I have lived. 

It is the story of a real journey, set in space and time, which is also intertwined with the narrative of the inner journey that allows us to transcend the limits of current historicity and find another narrative that goes beyond the vision of the West and the East as separate entities or judged according to parameters of beauty and importance. Today, more than ever, we need to re-establish a common sense and to restore harmony through a renewed relationship with nature. 

The encounters aim to familiarize with otherness and with the process that leads to the recognition of ourselves in the other; the encounter becomes an opportunity for transformation and self-completion, reducing the feeling of distance and strangeness towards what we consider to be different from ourselves. Conversations about otherness also refer to the dialogue between East and West, symbolically present in each of us, and to the ongoing conversation between intuition and reason, between the conscious and unconscious parts of ourselves, in the constant search for harmony between opposites. This is a field of inquiry that seeks to relate the inside to the outside, emphasizing that the processes of integrating or excluding our inner parts reflect the process of welcoming or separating from what is outside us.

In order to further enrich the conversation and to integrate East and West in a concrete way, I invite local people to participate in the project as moderators and to jointly introduce topics that inspire the participants in the dialogue. The content of the conversation depends solely on the moderator and the participants: their curiosity and sensitivity to the themes of travel and my artworks will guide the meeting. 

A great inspiration for the development of my project was the book "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell, in which the myth of the Hero's Journey is described as a universal theme of human adventure and transformation. In particular, this book offered me a key to dealing with the difficulties I was experiencing during the return phase of my journey, the transition from the extraordinary world of the journey to the ordinary world from which I had departed. According to Campbell, in this phase the hero must find a way to make available to the world his own potential, discovered during the journey, in order to contribute and reintegrate himself into society. My exhibition project is my own personal way of making available to everyone the wonders I have discovered about myself and the world during my travels.

To commemorate the centenary of Marco Polo's death, a new series of works was added this year, 'I Am You', representing the connection between my journey and Marco's, over 700 years apart. The search for this connection was proposed by the Italian Embassy in Tehran on the occasion of the anniversary, after considering the idea of hosting my exhibition project 'Towards East'.