Insights & Stories

During my journey to Varanasi, I spent many days exploring one of the most spiritual and intense cities in India. I walked along the ghats, watched the Ganges at sunrise and sunset, crossed ancient alleys, temples, markets, crowded riverbanks and silent places, trying to experience Varanasi not only as a traveller, but as an artist listening deeply to the city. It is not a place you simply visit: it gets under your skin, forces you to look, to slow down, to feel life, death, devotion and transformation as parts of the same flow. I spent many evenings walking alone along the ghats of Varanasi, far from the usual tourist routes and from the areas where Western travellers normally gather. I wanted to find a more authentic side of the city, to observe the Ganges up close, to follow the everyday movements of people, to listen to the sounds of rituals, to watch the smoke, the lights, the boats, the shadows and the way everything seems to merge into one great sacred scene. Varanasi is an incredible, powerful place, almost impossible to describe completely, because every detail seems to carry something ancient and universal. This journey through India also became an important part of my artistic research. The images gathered along the Ganges, the colours of the city, the faces I encountered, the spirituality of the ghats and the suspended atmosphere of Varanasi will all flow into the mural I will create on the theme of Temperance. A work connected to balance, purification, inner transformation and the dialogue between Western symbolism and Indian spirituality. And then Varanasi was also everyday life: delicious samosas eaten in the street, coffee with masala spices, hot chai, intense scents, chaos, sudden silences and the constant surprise of finding paneer everywhere, often replacing meat, soft, spicy and unmistakably Indian.

Mumbai is toxic and beautiful, chaotic, dirty, luminous, messy, destructive and full of energy. It is one of those places that seem almost too intense to be lived normally, and yet every time I return to India I realise that Mumbai somehow manages to make me feel strangely at home. This is my third time in Mumbai, the second time this year alone, and I still cannot fully explain why, even while walking through the most overwhelming, harsh and suffocating parts of the city, I feel as if I am in the right place. Over the years, I have explored many sides of this city: its most chaotic neighbourhoods, traffic filled streets, markets, walls, restaurants, street corners with incredible food, its brightest areas and its rawest ones. I have moved through Mumbai with friends I met there, ridden across it on a scooter, painted graffiti, walked, eaten, observed and breathed in its constant energy. It is a city that consumes you, but at the same time gives back an enormous force. Mumbai is also the incredible beauty of its people, their generosity, their ability to welcome you even inside a chaos that seems impossible to understand. It is the amazing food in restaurants like Mantra or Sunny, but also the food eaten on street corners, among spices, noise, lights, traffic and everyday life. Every return to Mumbai is a new journey into Indian urban culture, into street art, into a city that keeps surprising me precisely because it never tries to be easy.

Rioja, in Peru, was everything I hoped to find in the Amazon rainforest. A living, beautiful, effortless South America, made of dense nature, humidity, rivers, deep silences, authentic food, generous people and a vitality that seems to rise directly from the earth. It is a place where the forest is not just a landscape, but a constant presence: it breathes, surrounds, hides, protects and surprises. During my journey to Rioja, I crossed the Amazon rainforest in search of the truest and wildest side of Peru, far from the most predictable tourist images. I experienced carnival, celebration, colour, music and popular energy, but also the absolute silence of nature. At dawn, among the trees and the humidity, I saw toucans, sloths, brightly coloured butterflies and howler monkeys. I crossed flooded forest areas, watching crabs move among roots and water, while the boat slowly drifted between the branches of the trees. Rioja is one of those places where travel becomes physical, almost primal. The Peruvian Amazon enters your body through its sounds, its smells, the heat, the rain, the endless green and the constant feeling that everything around you is alive. Moving by boat through trees inhabited by animals, stories, giant boas and the possible shadow of black jaguars felt like entering an ancient, powerful, natural and sacred imagination. Between nature, food, carnival, wildlife and tropical forest, Rioja showed me one of the most intense and authentic sides of Peru. Not just a destination in the Amazon region, but a complete experience, a place where South America appears in its freest, most generous and magnetic form.