Dear Father
Dear Father redefines the father-son dynamic through role reversal, exploring acceptance and identity. In this intimate project, Danilo Zocatelli paints his father’s face, shifting their long-established roles. By revisiting childhood spaces and challenging perceptions, the work becomes both a personal reconciliation and a powerful statement on transformation, memory, and understanding.
Photography Danilo ZocatelliDear Father subverts traditional representations of love between a father and son, using role reversal as a means to explore acceptance. In this personal project, the artist paints his father’s face, flipping the roles they had always known. The father becomes the performer, while the artist—marked by his queerness, long hair, and piercings—is normalised.
At its core, Dear Father is a project that seeks to recapture and rewrite childhood memories, allowing the artist to finally feel like himself around his father. Through revisiting familiar places—such as the football field where he was once encouraged to play every Sunday—the project becomes a microscopic observation of the family home, an intimate space where personal history is both revisited and redefined.
This exploration extends to their farm in Brazil, where the artist photographs his father performing everyday tasks—tending the land, riding his motorcycle, even slaughtering a sheep. Yet this time, his father does so in drag, embodying a version of himself the artist had never recognized before. Willingly stepping into this role, he allows himself to be captured up close in full makeup, challenging the boundaries of identity and representation. In this act of transformation, Dear Father becomes more than a photographic series; it is a meeting point between father and son, photographer and photographed—a space where past and present converge, reshaping their understanding of one another.
The project also includes a letter the artist wrote to his father, with each image named after fragments of that letter. The portraits serve as visual “translations” of the artist’s intentions—creating a bridge, a connection, where father and son can look at each other and see their reflections as equals.
The artist also reclaims the word golo—a term from his family’s dialect once used as a homophobic slur to diminish him. Now, it serves as a catalyst for this project. The work is not just an act of personal healing but a direct response to those who once misjudged and labelled him. Through his active participation, the artist’s father offers an unmistakable message of acceptance—a powerful counterstatement to the perceptions of their extended family and community in Brazil.
Dear Father serves as a cherished, microcosmic yet profound message that people are capable of far greater understanding than they may realize. The image of the artist’s father riding a motorcycle through the farm, the wind flowing through his bouffant hair, stands as a powerful testament to this transformation on many levels.
“The artist also reclaims the word Golo—a term from his family’s dialect once used as a homophobic slur to diminish him.”
About Danilo Zocatelli Cesco
Danilo Zocatelli Cesco (b. 1989) is an award-winning Italo-Brazilian artist based in London. His practice, rooted in curiosity and a commitment to impactful artistry, explores themes of identity, storytelling, and human experience. Drawing inspiration from personal and collective narratives, his work delves into subjects such as illness, incarceration, the underground worlds of dominance and submission, hate crimes, and queer resilience—while also navigating his own journey of reconnection with his father.
Danilo’s artistic approach is deeply personal, influenced by his departure from Brazil in 2012 and enriched by his culinary background. His multidisciplinary practice integrates cameraless photography, papermaking, sculpture, video, and sound to uncover new perspectives, people, and histories.
His work has been widely exhibited, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art (New Contemporaries) London, Proud Gallery, Art Number 23, Athens, Greece, the British in San Francisco US and Mexican Embassy. He has received several prestigious awards, including New Contemporaries 2024, the RPS International Photography Award 166, and the College Photographer of the Year – Gold. His projects have been featured in Source Magazine and Offprint at Tate Modern.
Danilo holds an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art (2024) and a First-Class BA (Hons) in Photography from the University of East London (2023). His academic journey, combined with his diverse creative influences, continues to shape his evolving practice.
To see more of his work, follow him on Instagram or visit his website.
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