OÙ ALLONS-NOUS D’ICI?

For those crossing deserts and oceans in makeshift transport, often the only baggage allowed are photographs. Small enough and light enough to be carried on one’s person, resistant enough to maintain the ties to one’s roots intact, by definition, they are the imprint of brief moments that we believe to be memorable.
Once taken, however, they become fragile surfaces similar to the epidermis, on which the light continues to work, slowly and relentlessly creating a new visible level: that of spots and marks, which above all have to do with processes, history and continuous and imperceptible transformations. It is this ephemeral and mutating level that interests Linda when she returns to Bordeaux with a scanner in her suitcase to scan Ali’s album: since childhood, she has been making small private archives of found objects that preserve their existence and memory. In this case, Linda is collecting those apparently insignificant spots and marks, crystallizing them, making them permanent and readable.
By working on the surface, she is actually working more deeply: a multi-faceted complex history is revealed. The images are no longer just a record of the highlights of Alì’s life, but become a map on which to trace his journey and that of many others like him. They also become the pretext to travelling that same path in reverse, all the way into the photographs, to discover everything that was left out of the frame, and everything that was in the frame but has now changed radically. The same images that for Ali represent memory at the point of arrival, become the starting point for Linda. Where does one go from here?

Text by Francesca Zoe Paterniani

Solo exhibition at Nelumbo Open Project, Bologna
May 19 – June 23 2018
Curated by Francesca Zoe Paterniani