By Alba Zari

Every woman inherits two X chromosomes, one of which can be paternal. Alba Zari uses the medium of photography as a tool of investigation, writing self-analytic notes to research the father she never met. The missing Y. Zari interprets photography as the poetry of her research - she documents with scientific rigour, and in real time, through specific photographic languages. She has a few clues about her father's identity: his name, his Iraqi nationality and his work at Emirates Airlines.

Raised in Bangkok, she discovered at 25 years of age that she doesn't have the same Thai blood like her brother. Using a physiognomy-based method, she studied her family album to identify the features that do not belong to her maternal genetic code, leading, by process of elimination, to traces of her father. She did a DNA test of her ancestral origins and collected official documents from which she detected someone who could be her father in the United States. Zari will reach out to him.

She also turns the camera on herself to reconstruct, from the features of her face, a 3D avatar of her father. Now she can imagine him, and try to research him online using social media. Alba uses the photographic medium as an analytical tool and artistic language with which she overcomes the lacuna of the Y and accepts the absence.

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Words by Francesca Seravalle