In the Secrecy of a Home (2024)
Alessandro Vicario
A collector asked me to photograph a house that belonged to close relatives of hers: a two-storey villa surrounded by a beautiful hedged garden between Varese and Laveno.
As she was acquainted with my previous works on domestic interiors (in particular Frammenti domestici tra memoria e oblio / Domestic Fragments Between Memory and Oblivion, 1999-2001, but also Paesaggi d'assenza. Sulle tracce di Lalla Romano / Landscapes of Absence. In the Footsteps of Lalla Romano, 2004), she entrusted me with the task of interpreting these spaces full of family memories.
Frammenti domestici tra memoria e oblio is inspired by a deep, intimate, emotional urgency. Paesaggi d'assenza, sulle tracce di Lalla Romano is about the home of a writer whose works I read and loved, and where my friend Antonio Ria, her last companion, lived.
Unlike the homes that had been the subject of previous works, this one was unknown to me, as were the people who had inhabited it.
At first, I spent a day there with my client, who shared her memories with me. Then I returned to carry out the work, which took several days. It was summertime: the days were clear and serene, the air warm and mild. The house had been almost completely emptied, as it happened with my paternal grandmother's apartment in Milan, the essential nucleus of the Frammenti domestici.
At the beginning I felt bewildered, but after a while I began to get in tune with the surroundings. The traces of these distant lives became almost familiar. I understood their universal dimension.
I was inspired by the silence and the uncertain stillness of those bare rooms.
In the Secrecy of a Home is the development of my earlier visual research into domestic places. It forms with them a kind of trilogy and perhaps it closes a cycle.
Once again, peculiar traces and memories, made visible (or more manifest) by the emptiness of the environment and transfigured by the photographic representation, ask to be received as signs of universal memories.
