36 Years of Life Together
“36 Years of Life Together” is a project, still in progress, about the silence of the family: despite having thousands of pictures in our family’s albums, happy relationships and daily life together, why do we not talk? Why do we not remember stories? Why do we not express our feelings? And why do we not say “I love you”? We are missing something. I decided therefore to create a family album that I would like one day to hold in my hands while seated in front of a fireplace.
I started my research from the idea that memory – as a precise and photographic tool able to recollect every single detail of our life and to organize it in chronological order- does not exist, instead we constantly create it, perhaps because of its dual nature at the boundary between reality and fictio, a duality it shares with photography.
What and how do we remember?
Why is memory so important?
Are we able to distinguish between what really happened and what has been created in our minds to cope with our present?
I found a diary of a stranger who had written about his life in detail. The most beautiful thing was the care and simplicity with which he revealed his feelings: he did not hide his emotions or how he felt about life; by contrast, I have lived my life in silence, – it means that I never heard my family to talk about feelings and emotions- so Idecided to own his memories and through them narrate what I miss and my appreciation of what I have.
His voice became mine in the creation of my family’s memory.