RICORDI

I grew up with my grandparents in Venice. My grandfather died of Parkinson when I was 18 after a year spent in the hospital. My grandmother was, even before this event, my only true point of reference. Despite the fact that our relationship was not always easy, she was home to me.

When I first noticed incongruences in her behaviour, I had already left our home for some years and was living in Berlin. When I moved to Lisbon in 2017, she was housebound, spending most of the day in bed. I would visit at least twice a year. She started to confuse dreams and reality.

Time slowly dissolved her sense of reality, the memories of my childhood started to fade away, and the house containing those memories was being emptied, changed, to adapt to her new state ... maybe in an attempt to save everything from oblivion, I decided to take these pictures.

She had become so small. She started to call my mum, her daughter, mother. She did not recognise me most of the time.

I was shaken by the thought of being the only one left who would remember. I wanted to free my mind from the anxiety and the fear of forgetting, encapsulating those memories of my childhood that were bound to her, the house, and many of the objects in it, using one 35mm black and white film.

I thought that, if the house would burn down tomorrow, what would I take? This 35mm film was my answer.

The pictures were taken during the course of 48 hours in August 2018 with my grandfather's camera (a Canon AE2). I thought he would appreciate the that I was now using this camera for this project, the same one with which he took so many pictures of my mother as a child.

My grandmother died the following summer. The house still belongs to the family.

This was born solely as a personal project, these pictures were never exhibited. It represents the very essence of what photography is for me; a glimpse of something past, a testament to a feeling that has already changed, the externalisation of a memory or thought that existed before only in our head.

A dream on paper.