The time deposited on house walls and inside us. The time of gaze and memory. The time of oblivion. Immaterial dimensions of experience that reveal themselves through tangible traces, that the photographic representation transfigures, transforms into signs. Signs of days lived through; of days remembered; of days forgotten (or doomed to be forgotten). Signs of somebody dear to me: my paternal grandmother, who dwelled among those walls for more than forty years. I lived with her for a while, on the fourth floor of a council house in Via Sant’Abbondio in Milan. Five years: the last ones of her long life. I isolated some fragments of the house, bare by then, and turned them into ‘visual evidence’. They recall the ambience they’ve been ‘drawn’ from, just as archaeological finds remind of people, places, events of the past. I photographed the house shortly after my grandmother’s death in January, 1999. Her flat had been almost completely cleared of its furniture: the resulting emptiness, beside exposing things hidden before, had filled itself with absence. I had returned to the house with my photo equipment, intending to photograph the doorpost on which my grandmother and my parents used to mark the progress of my growth when I was a child. Checking the dates, one would notice that the measurements were almost always taken on a Saturday. Every Saturday my father came to pick me up from school and we went to have lunch at my grandmother’s place. Then I stayed with her the whole afternoon. At dusk, I was seized by melancholy. And when my father or my mother came to fetch me at night, parting from my grandmother brought tears to my eyes. And when I had quarrelled with her – which happened sometimes – parting was even sadder. As I said, I had gone back there to photograph the doorpost. But walking through the empty, silent rooms, I became aware of the many traces of life that the absence of furniture had revealed or made more manifest. I was deeply impressed by them. The grief from my recent loss was intense, but it sharpened my senses and made memories more alive (and heartbreaking) than ever. And so it happened that, after photographing the doorpost, I started taking pictures of another detail, and then another, and another... For over a week I went back there everyday, and everyday I stayed there from morning till evening. I observed, remembered, waited for the best light, and photographed. Without haste, concentrating on things that remain in the background of everyday life and usually don’t get much attention, but that photography can convert into signs charged with symbolic values and emotional echoes. The flat in Via Sant’Abbondio has since then been sold to a young woman. It has been renovated and modernized. Those walls, branded by life and time, don’t exist anymore. Their traces remain in the memory of a few and in the emulsion of some tens of photographic plates. Later on, my parents decided to modernize the old house in Chianciano, Tuscany, where I used to spend part of my summer holidays as a child and as a boy with my grandmother. That house was special. Located in the heart of the old town, in ‘Chianciano paese’, as it used to be called (in opposition to Chianciano Terme, the new part): a wide flat with high ceilings, exposed beams and thick walls, on the ground floor of an apartment house that once hosted the convent of the Franciscan Sisters, adjoining the collegiate church. There is still something cloistral about the shared lobby, and the solemn voice of the organ resounds through the apartment when mass is celebrated in the church close by. The thought that those walls would be cleaned up and whitewashed, and the floors replaced, led me to carry on there the research I had already undertaken in Milan. And so the second part of the Domestic fragments was born. It had been years since I was in Chianciano. I went there in the summer of 2000 and then again in the summer of 2001. I chose the summer to find the atmosphere and the light of that time again. We always went there between July and August; never once did we go there in another season. Now of those walls and floors, too, there’s nothing left but the uncertain traces of human memory and those, just as precarious, of photographic memory. The images forming Domestic fragments aim at being true reproductions of the portions of world they represent. I worked with a large format camera, my father’s old Linhof Technicardan: an instrument that supports meticulous accuracy and guarantees the fine restitution of details. Still, paradoxically, the faithful reproduction of some fragments of reality, isolated from their context, transfigures reality itself: the photographically reproduced objects appear as something new, almost unexpected. And it is just this different, renewed vision of what seemed known and familiar, that is for me one of the reasons for the fascination and expressive power of photography.
Alessandro Vicario, Milan, November 2005
