federicocalogero

-Ùn ti scurdà di a filetta!- is an ancient Corsican expression still used today by the elderly, a warning to the new generations not to forget their origins. The fern has an intense connection with Corsica, a perennial plant, with deep and indestructible roots, it wonderfully symbolizes the Corsicans’ attachment to their native land.

If being there is the first condition for remembering, how is it possible to pass on a feeling like that nostalgia?

N’oublie pas is a project created during the artist residency at Casell’Arte in Venaco, Corsica, which explores the concept of identity and memory as the essence of the connection between people and territory through nostalgia. The territory becomes an object of discovery, a space that leads us to imagine something that perhaps we have been.
An opaque mirror in which to recognize only what we are not.

This work was created thanks to the support of the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) through the Italian Cultural Institute
of Paris (IIC Paris) and by the Fabbrica Culturale Casell’Arte.

This editorial project gravitates around the concept of incommunicability and how our emotional memory can influence our gaze.
I have nothing to tell you except the things I would tell you softly is a slow story, indecisive and at times confused, is a look composed of two points of view. That of my mother, a deaf woman, and my father’s, a man who doesn’t speak. I asked myself: – how ours works memory when we remember someone who did we love? – so I decided to entrust them with it making the images in this book. Their unconscious dialogue becomes my archive to take care of and by composing their shots I have created a memoir, an intimate diary. To their photographic gaze, mine is added, in text form, in a stream of consciousness that analyzes the evolution of my gaze. The book has the ambition to be unsaid, a gap. An intentional omission of parts of a story and at this point it may even seem easy to speak of incommunicability by omitting, literally not photographing but I think deciding what not to say, what not to photograph is the choice aware of my research and, in full, the choice of each author.

What happens to our memory when we remember someone we loved?

Memory sometimes forgets to remember to forget.
By working on contrasting emotions, which are reflected in memory as two competing activities,
senza memoria, senza sentimento is the attempt to make an experience understandable subjective
and therefore dangerously foggy. Drawing from my photographic archive, I relied on the transfer technique, which consists in transferring pigments from one surface to another. A peculiar feature of the procedure is its own imperfect effectiveness, the high error rate in the image transfer, which can lead to random loss of portions of it. The pages alternate moments of
total despair, represented by the most total darkness where the removal has made a clean
sweep, to others so clear as to revive the emotion of that trace of memory.

They say memory has its own spin, which declines with age. Store and forget at the same time.
Without realizing it, we spend entire lives trying to recover a memory and project it
again into the present. However, how many of these reconstructed moments actually happened?
What if you find yourself in a new but strangely familiar place?
As if the many levels of overwriting of our memory let through fragments of what has already been seen, experienced. The incipit of the fanzine is a tribute to Pasolini, “the sun that burns everything” inspired the aesthetics of the slides, burned precisely by the bleaching during the development phase. Sotto il cielo di Roma tutto brucia is a compass, an invitation to move within a space, to look for a different light to see better. An invitation to move between the folds of our memory.

Are we able to remember the exact moment we realize we love a person? We can reduce falling in love to a simple glance, an epidermal attraction destined to extinguish with the same initial strength and superficiality, the kinematic love at first sight. Lacan argues that in the course of our life we ​​can meet millions of people, of these millions we can desire hundreds but of these hundreds, we love only one.

But is it really so?

If it is true that we can give something a name only when we are able to distinguish it, contextualize it and therefore recognize it, how is it possible to materialize something which by its nature is unique? Entimema is an imaginary memoir, it recreates lived places and signs of a fragmented memory that find fertile ground in the universal concept of love for my questions on the incommunicability in human relationships.