The Buzz Project is a monumental body of photographic work centered on the contemporary metropolis, the urban environment, and its infinite layers of reality and humanity. We have been carrying out this project for ten years (2010-2020), taking photos from the windows of public buses in ten iconic cities around the world (Brooklyn, New York; São Paulo, Brazil; Milan, Italy; Havana, Cuba; Istanbul, Turkey; Mumbai, India; Mexico City, Mexico; Paris, France; Tokyo, Japan; and Miami, Florida).
The work is conceived as a multi-series documentary project, with the ultimate goal of composing a complex and multifaceted metaphor of urban life as we know it. One by which to address contemporary issues with far-reaching consequences impacting the life of future generations, such as urbanization, social inequalities and the environmental conditions of urban habitats in general.
The choice of the bus becomes a statement of purpose. A powerful democratic symbol in itself (bus is short for omnibus, “for all”, in Latin) and a ubiquitous element of the global urban landscape, the bus and its route become markers of a metropolis’s social level of (in-)equity and of its (un-)sustainable growth pattern.
Never seen in the pictures, the bus is also the invisible playwright behind the scenes. Like an urban kaleidoscope “gifted with consciousness”, from its slightly elevated and movable deck, it offers a privileged view over the tumultuous and colourful drama of city life, continuously framing its landscape into meaningful sequences, where the marginal becomes crucial, and the unglamorous powerfully evocative.
On board the bus, the viewer is turned into a present-day flâneur, an urban omnivorous explorer who has adapted his speed and scope to the vibrant pace and the sprawling vastness of contemporary urban areas. Like the algorithm from a “generative psychogeography” experience, the bus route carves unexpected and unpredetermined paths through the metropolis, offering a bounty of sights so powerful in their symbolic nature each disclosing a secret and an unspeakable truth about urban life.
The Buzz Project series is then an ambitious attempt at documenting the contemporary urban ecosystem and its dwellers: the urbanites and the urbanized, the as they live, prosper or simply survive in a globalized urban habitat across the world, at a time of an unprecedented and ever expanding planetary-scale urbanization.
More than this, the Buzz Project is an invitation to activate an otherwise dormant inner vision, and open the eyes of consciousness on the beauty of every day life, which can be pervasive even along the sidewalks of a metropolis’ concrete expanse.
Each fleeting image is praise to the resilience of beauty, which – like grass blades piercing through concrete – can emerge in the most unexpected places and that can ultimately reconcile humans to the challenges of their daily quest for a better future in an increasingly intimidating man-made environment.