“The Hands of the City” project was born in L’Aquila, a city immobile and silent for years, condemned to this fate by an earthquake and a horrible political spell. Then, all of a sudden, almost two years ago reconstruction began; the cranes arrived, a great many in fact, to act as go-between for the city and sky. But a city doesn’t build itself, it is rebuilt, by thousands of people, thousands of hands. Pajewski calls these, for this reason, “The Hands of the City”. In the photographs the hands’ intense gazes are marked by the profound darkness of the interior spaces and courtyards to be rebuild, their faces are illuminated by the clear and limpid light typical of the city and of Pajewski’s photos. Faces that willingly interact with the camera, directly and short of time, the bundled up bodies with helmets pressing hard against their heads, framed by the neverending rigid shapes of the indifferent tubes. A city and the men who in the majority are not even natives here.
