moom bookshop

"I’m showing how big the sky is" is a tribute by Martina Bacigalupo to her former nanny Chiou Taur Wu, a Taiwanese woman who lived for more than three decades in Italy.

Battered by life – from a childhood spent in the fields of the south of the country to working in a factory in Taipei, while still a teenager, to the gambling debts of her Italian husband which forced her to work day and night – Chiou Taur don’t let yourself be defeated. Returning to Taiwan at almost 70 years old, she decides to take her revenge on life and do everything she was unable to do before: she resumes her studies, enrolls in ballroom dance classes , and begins to travel.

Through hundreds of photos received from Chiou during ten years of correspondence, the Italian photographer offers us the story of extraordinary resilience. Told in the first person, with images and words by Chiou, this book, published by L’Artiere Éditions, is a song of freedom, full of humor and poetry.

Martina Bacigalupo, born in Genoa in 1978, studied literature and photography before moving to Burundi, East Africa, where she worked for ten years as a freelance documentary photographer.

Her work, focused on women rights and migration, investigates the visual dynamics between Africa and the West and has been featured in many leading publications, including The New York Times, Le Monde and The Sunday Times Magazine. Her photographs are part of several collections and museums, among which the Artur Walther Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. She is the author of the photo book “Gulu Real Art Studio”, published by Steidl in 2013. Martina currently works as a photographer and photo editor in Paris.