Sparks

"What the artist is, is creator of truth, because truth is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced; it has to be created. There is no other truth than the creation of the New: creativity, emergence" (G. Deleuze)

Just as in crime movies the forensic technicians arrive on the “crime scene”, shut the lights down and enlighten the scene with UV lights to let stains and traces sparkle in the dark, thus letting the latent truth of an event emerge for a moment, this series uses a similar concept to explore the relationship between reality and memory, and the potential of the artistic representation to blend them in order to create a new “truth” – which actually belongs to the only proper realm of truth we can get close to, the truth of representation through ourselves, our sensitivity, our conscience, our memory. I got fascinated by the possibilities of representing memory in photography from quite the very start of my photographic journey (even before knowing it…), which in fact started, among other reasons, from a sort of need to reconnect with my hometown and the places of my life after a few years away from them. I chose the City Park of Monza both because it is the place I have the strongest attachment to, and because artistically nature works particularly fine in terms of universality, recognizability and relatability. But simply going out and portray the places as they appeared wouldn’t really have done justice to the theme and to my specific relationship with them, which is – just as for anyone in respect of the places they call “home” – purely intimate and largely based on memory, souvenirs, glimpses of nostalgia. All of these aspects would have been still confined in my head, and only I could see them emerge from the shots. Hence the use of lights to represent the symbolic “sparks” of memory, the traces of human affection, the residual of past life – my life – still encrusted in places. And that’s also the moment in which this series can become relatable to viewers, inviting them to explore this great ability of human conscience to see the external reality as a sort of permanent extension of our memory and our inner self.

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