Trial Version

My project "Trial Version" consists in the superposition of images taken recently, the background, and details of found images belonging to my family album. This series aims to explores the concept of memories, past and transcience.

Images contribute to building our memory: an inherited memory on which is based our perception of the past and our knowledge of self and that influences our identity as well as our relationships with others.

However, we should question ourselves how much does this memory obsess us, or if this memory is really reliable?

“In photography, you can never deny that the thing has been there. There is the superposition of the reality and of the past,” says Roland Barthes. This is the paradox of both photography and memories – they seem to be vivid and true, even though they can often be misleading and so easily altered.

Those pale and faded found family pictures belong to a period, or refer to episodes that I can’t truly remember and some even preceded my birth. However, after looking at them for an uncountable number of times, I have absorbed and appropriated these images as if the scene represented had been truly experienced. These images have the power to disturb or comfort me as well as the power to affect the perception of my family members and my relationships with them.

In trial version series the deconstruction of this important set of inherited memories – displacing them in time and space – aims to reveal the conflict between memory and truth, past and present, imagination and reality. In a similar way, photography itself reveals us the transience of everything and the subjectivity of the interpretation of the reality.

The background represents the present. The settings show ruins and decays of formerly glorious places in Genoa (Italy). These places still reveal nostalgic traces of their past, but are now completely overturned. On the other hand, the present is also represented by anonymous spaces in Singapore – aseptic and free from any trace of the past.

In these containers, memories and images float and impose their presence obsessively and repeatedly, while the odd combination of the two images enhances the contradiction between remembrance and feeling, past and present, reality and imagination.