The artist’s research, which has now spanned ten years, focuses on rustic abandoned spaces in the Ossola, in the specific style of the Montecrestese village. This area turns out to be the best possible background for the creation of films that deal with themes tied to the natural world, a world full of rhythms and performances reminiscent of ancient manual skills. The photographer emphasizes how a region, or any other traditional local form, can become an object of study and at the same time a focus of personal research. Few artists today know how to hand down the collective or personal memories of the past in a clear way; Toja’s artwork has the ability to do just this, and manages to do it in a different way each time, sometimes serving as what may seem sere documentation as in his series of unattended cathedrals, other times including well-researched, studied, and even simulated details which, in the legacy and “in De cubiculi fragmentis”, offer us an inside portrait of the artist’s personal point of view.

These photographs create a sense of suspension in time; the artist favors black and white for a specific reason, using this technique to represent the idea of something that has come to a halt, that hasn’t changed with the passing of the years. It’s not that the photographer is reluctant to join in the fascination with the allure of the digital age, but rather that he chooses to remain “tied” to an old Hasselblad 500C.