Leaving a Mark

"Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance, on account of their scars" states Chris Marker in La Jetée.

Everything leaves a mark. Every single experience that we live, every image that we are subjected to, every memory leaves a mark; a trace of its passage, even if in small proportions. Indelible marks, which contribute to the development of our personal identity, marks that mark us, define us, giving us the chance to change and grow.


Leaving a Mark is a series about loss, memories and the marks that they create.
It all started from an experience so strong that deeply affected us.
Loss is a deprivation. A lack of something, the absence creates a kind of emptiness, a ‘blackness’ that signs us, traces its non-presence on us, impresses us;  Leaving a mark that we are not able to erase and that is impossible to hide completely or to heal.  The work narrates an intimate story, in which real and unreal mix together. Giving new life to colours, feelings, moments, fragments, flashes of memories, relations and experiences that are already part of our past but remain in the present through images/marks.
  My practice is evolving through a series of family portraits, still lifes and landscapes. The body, as much as the landscape and the still lifes, became the inscribed surface of events (rephrasing M. Foucault).
The darkroom practice becomes a physical representation of the act of remembering and imagining through materials. I am pushing the process to its limit, the grain as much as the mistakes are all part of the final work, sometimes even impossible to be reproduced, which became as unique as a memory.  The poems are slowly becoming part of the photographic process as well. Engraved on the surface of the photographic paper, they represent visually and physical the concept of the Mark, as a wound that doesn't heal and preserve the character of its creation.
  First intention of the series was to narrate a personal story about loss and memory; with the passing of time, I realised that personal and collective  as intimate and political are, sometimes, converging together.