I used to
(2012)
I often find myself thinking obsessively about the past. About heavenly childhood times and the fleeting adolescence. I am interested in the objectivity of time and how memories are inevitably altered by our feelings. This project is about the pleasant fright that moves me when a sudden scent travels through my senses, bringing back a repressed memory.
I imagined myself back in the places of my childhood, in Sardinia. Gradually I started assembling them to vernacular pictures of my family and images of my diary. As a result the memories are just partially true: they merge with the imaginary and with fragments of some beloved people’s stories. In this way they originate a deep but not true emotion: as a matter of fact someone else’s perception arises in addition to our own. I wanted this to happen in such an intimate way that it is not possible to tell apart my own memories from my parents’ and friends’ one.
While the work is about my self-knowledge and my relationship with memory, it is also a means to evoke the transience of time as duration. The images want to recall an important state of life by blending the conscious with the unconscious and altering the rules in favour of the instinct.