Dayana 

Dayana is a 34-year-old woman from Santiago de Cuba, living in a 25-square-meter apartment in a courtyard shared by 17 families. She has three daughters—Juliane, 14; Julianis, 12; and Jimena, 5—born from two different relationships. With her family far away in Havana, Dayana's closest relationships are with her neighbors and her godmother, Elvis, 60.

Dayana worked in a textile factory but now earns a living through teaching dance lessons—the government rations food, water, and electricity. With severe inflation, Cuban citizens rely on informal and local economies to access basic goods.

Cuba faces a prolonged economic crisis, worsened by U.S. sanctions and the pandemic. Over a million Cubans left between 2022 and 2023. The country suffers from an aging population and low birth rates, with bleak economic and social prospects. Despite the hardships, Dayana and the community in Santiago de Cuba demonstrate resilience, supporting each other through daily challenges like waiting hours for banking services or affording food.

All photos were taken in Santiago de Cuba, in July 2024.

Michele Crestani

Michele Crestani is a photographer born in 1992 in Magenta, Italy, and studied biomedical engineering at Politecnico di Milano. While working on his Masters degree, he moved to Singapore for a year and a half where he also pursued photography as an amateur, bringing to the surface a gift that his father passed on to him as a child. Through trips in Southeast Asia, Michele witnessed extreme poverty, different religions, and glittering luxury. These aspects—combined with the interest in how history and recent society shape human beings—influenced his vision of the world and relationships with others.

Michele moved to Milan in 2018, where he obtained a PhD in Systems Medicine. His maturation involved a search for other means to express himself as well as to document and understand people and their social dynamics. For this reason, he has been attending the photo reportage photography school, Valerio Bispuri, since November 2022.

In 2022, he moved to Zurich, Switzerland where he regularly works on documentary photography projects regarding home accessibility, carried out with a squat community in Zurich. The long-term development of this work envisages motivating what keeps this community alive and narrating its often-forgotten anthropological aspects. He now also works as a freelance photographer.