The visual essay «Do hands dream in Italian?» is made in collaboration with the performer and mime Rebeca Garcia, capable of representing the expressiveness of the face and hands. The session was filmed in a surreal and dreamy forest at the top of Sintra’s Mountain where we even came across a lady's grave in the middle of nature.
As an Italian, I am well aware of the importance of hand and body gestures as a form of communication. But, after all, despite the country of origin, we all speak with gestures that can have the same or different meanings – sign language itself is not universal, each country has its own sign language.
There are different theories to explain why Italians speak with their hands and one of them says that Italy is a very recent country only unified in 1861 and composed at the time of different states with their own language (dialect) – so the gestures were and are needed to interact and break down language barriers within them.
