“Shining Splashs” is a photographic project developed in Rome between 2022 and 2023, telling the story of the Paralympic swimming champion Federico Bassani.
Federico, born in Rome in March 1996, loses his sight completely at the age of 5 due to bilateral retinoblastoma.
However, thanks to the support and determination of his parents, Federico does not succumb to despair but continues to cultivate the great passion for swimming and water that he had discovered since childhood.
It is thanks to this passion that at the age of 17, a turning point comes that changes his life: “I started swimming at the age of five, just after losing my sight, but I started training at seventeen, following a call from a team looking for disabled athletes.”
It’s the decisive moment: in 2018, he becomes part of the Paralympic swimming team, subsequently becoming the Italian record holder in the 50m freestyle S11 (visually impaired category) and in the 100m breaststroke S11 (visually impaired category).
In 2021, he participates in Tokyo in his first Paralympic Games in the pool in the 100m breaststroke, a milestone he still considers the most beautiful moment of his career.
“Sport is the moment when I can express myself within the pool.” He especially loves the freedom of movement in swimming: “It’s one of the few sports where a blind person doesn’t need a guide for movement.” The athlete he is inspired by is not a swimmer: “I have always appreciated Alex Zanardi for his fighting spirit and his willpower.”
He has taken on the title of a song by Caparezza “You have to do what makes you feel good” and swimming makes him feel good because in the water “it’s just you and it“.
Federico’s story also perfectly reflects the sense that the author wanted to express with the entire photographic project LET’S FLY.
Losing sight is a profoundly dramatic event for any human being, and for a 5-year-old child, perhaps even more so.
But thanks to the extraordinary sensitivity that Federico had developed in the early years of life in relation to water, he manages to find a new birth, despite the illness and the resulting visual impairment. That’s why he found redemption in the water, so much so that he abandoned other sports practiced previously (such as baseball for the blind) that did not recreate in him those inner images of himself that swimming did, allowing him to achieve successes rationally unimaginable.
Thanks to this rediscovered dimension, today Federico holds a degree in Clinical Engineering and is studying to obtain a master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering because his goal is to participate in research on the bionic eye.
He is passionate about cooking and loves playing the acoustic guitar.