Faded Memories

2016

This project explores the concept of memories, their construction and their reliability. Photographs have always contributed to the construction of our memory and used to be a documentation of our past and our heritage that deeply impact our perception of self and our relationships. However, both memories and photographs do not forcedly represent the truth.
These images are a collage. The background consists in pictures that have been taken for this project, they show ruins and decay of formerly beautiful places in Genoa (my hometown) and represent the context and the feeling of the specific moment in which I did the photographs. On this background I have superimposed crops of family albums that depict my mom and my brothers who are no longer with us and myself as a child.

The family album has been an important reference for me to build consciousness of my identity and my past, although it offered me a partial and idealised view of the reality to which I felt attached vision for years. These images decontextualise significant images of the family album and reflect the moment of the disillusion and of the contradiction between remembrance and feeling, past and present, reality and imagination.

Nowadays people debate on the lack of reliability of photos which can be easily be modified to create a different reality, however I claim that this phenomenon has always existed and that nor photographs nor memories have ever told any truth.