Le forme del tempo. Archeologia di memoria familiare

EDITION

2023, Shortlisted

school

ISIA - Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche, Urbino, Italy

Links

chiarasolimene.com
@chiara.solimene

Objects are forms assumed by time. They represent the universe of human production and always reflect a specific time where necessity, functionality and desirability dictate the becoming of history, of the present, thus also the forms that man invents and spreads and the spaces that he constitutes. Every present time becomes past time and consequently every object that belongs to a given present will become an object from which the past shines. But rather than "objects", the term of which recalls something that stands at a distance from the subject, which «prohibits the subject from its immediate affirmation, with what, precisely, it 'objects' to its claims of domination» [Bodei R., La vita delle cose, Laterza, 2009], we intend to speak about the field of “things" which, unlike the latter, contains a knot of relations that know how to tell about themselves to man and that know how to tell about man. Here the "thing" becomes a message of dimensions belonging, sometimes, to a life long gone. In becoming past, time brings things with it into the new dimension of memory, things that in turn acquire the characteristic and charm of the ancient. Around them time is able to come to a halt thus making them available to a dialogue about the relationship between time and different cultures, between time and objects, thus between time and man. This suspended time that things are able to activate speaks, at the same time, of proximity, of contact with man, of the "inframince", a category within which Duchamp inscribed «all substances, states, minimal differences, sharings, passages of state on the edge of the imperceptible and distinguishable, real but not optical, not "retinal," which are grasped only with 'gray matter,' that is, with mental exercise» [Grazioli E., Fotografia e infrasottile, in Aisthesis, Firenze University Press, 2018]. On a knitting needle or in a thimble, on the handle of a fan or in the fold of a pillow, on a slightly yellowed cotton tablecloth or on the edge of a coffee cup are kept the warmth and contact of man, and it is in spaces like these, liminal between the mere utility of an object and its capacity for communication, that lies its collective and individual memory. From the research and subsequent documentation of these things-suspended -that the more they suggest a presence the more they speak of an emptiness- was born "Le forme del tempo. Archeologia di memoria familiare", a photographic book regarding the analysis of my family's domestic environment, which on the one hand, the paternal one, has undergone profound transformations since the death of my grandmother Olinda in 2019, and on the other hand an environment that has remained frozen since the moment grandmother Pupa passed away in September 2021. These testimonies also tell about an unknown blood, namely our loved ones whose memory is only possible through stories, photographs and from the very things of daily life that also belonged to them. A few precise questions accompanied the research phase, as well as the designing and producing of this project: what are we really looking for by digging into family memory? What do we expect the spaces and things that survive our loved ones after their passing to have to tell us? Perhaps the spaces and what we have learned to call "things" are a biography, a self-portrait of our loved ones, within which echo voices, sounds, smells, tastes, memories of times of celebration and sometimes of hardship, their never-ending stories.