On November 25, around on 23:00 pm, my father passed away. It was just me, my mother and Death breathing on us in the last five years.  During all that time I wanted to take hold of his body that was slowly consuming itself like a mountain, but now I just want to hold onto his memory to avoid it being swept away forever.

I just want to understand what memory is made of: how to practice it, how it has been powered, where does it go, what it has to do with the images, with the truth, with the memory itself, with the History per se and with the history of the community as a whole.

I scanned all his file recovering memories that don’t belong to me: youth, experiences, his views about things in general, interlacing the scannings with “collateral photographs”: pictures with a therapeutic and cathartic purpose, a study for exploration and reconciliation with oneself.

This job doesn’t follow a narrative progression and for this reason is fragmentary, sudden and unexpected, just as the memory is. The recollection is turned into images, open-images in which one can find a story, far from being an individual one but more as a common, collective and recurrent grief.

The whole creative process has been a research on Memory and historical methodologies aimed at its literal unveiling. Mnemosyne, Greek Goddess of Memory and mother of the Muses, is also the title of the artwork by Aby Warburg from which this work takes inspiration from, especially for its historical-visual approach, favoring the idea that Memory is anything but something static that must be transmitted by ceremony, but rather an emotional activator capable of triggering powerful chemical reactions in reality. In other words, able to creating beauty.