Summer 1993
“…So I slowly recollect memories of sounds, of wind skimming over my skin and of all sorts of physical and mental perceptions.
I recall soft surfaces.
I recall the strong smell of wild grass and a gentle breeze ruffling my hair. There was a very bright light.
I can remember my mother’s skin scent after she spent all day in the sun. These are uncertainties, faint memories suddenly surfacing from an undefined depth.
But there is one thing I know for sure: that one was a very sunny week.
It was 1993, summer I believe.”
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“Summer 1993” is a work that analyse memory and how we reconstruct moments of our lives basing our knowledge of the instant on photographic images.
In this photographic research I want to bring the attention of the viewer on how we associate different feelings to a single memory and how each of our senses plays a crucial role in determining the memory as a whole. In the last few decades a lot of research was made with regard to the study of the mechanisms through which the brain record, store and recollect memories. The process the brain utilizes to build up a memory is a dynamic one. Therefore when it comes to memory there is the need for all the separated stimuli to be linked together again in order to recreate the original scene.
The images in the series are taken today, but describing the past. In the series I feel there is a temporal gap being filled; time looses its significance leaving all the importance to the emotions arising from the images. The photographs forming the series are meant to be feeling-conveyors: through the blurriness of shapes, the delicacy of the colour hues and the white, nearly blinding light a sense of dizziness is created. And to me, it feels like the same dizziness I perceive when thinking back to that summer, nearly a decade ago.