For you, to remember her often
“For you, to remember her often " is a sentence I found on the backside
of an old photo, written by a friend of Mirta, one of the women
portrayed in these images.
We take photos to remember, to leave a trace of ourselves, of our
present and past. Barthes affirmed that thanks to these images we attest
to our existence. What we see in the image, therefore, must have
existed in some form in front of our eyes. And what if it were not so?
If we could use them as a symbolic ground to imagine and create new
scenarios?
This work is the result of this research. I worked with archive images,
trying to investigate the meaning of private and collective identity.
The images narrate my family history, they are of my grandmother, mother
and aunt, but they also tell something about Doris and Mirta, women
born and raised in the ‘20s and’ 40s, whom I only met through the family
albums I was given. I have deconstructed the images from the past and
integrated them in new scenery made of modern landscapes, thus playing
with the meaning of memory.
There is a word in Hebrew called "Tikkun ", which means "to mend”, to go
back in time and repair past events, healing the world from mistakes
that were made.
This project aims at the impossible: to make it right, unify different narratives, change the final.
