AZIMUTHS OF CELESTIAL BODIES
(2017)
We must care about memories because much of what we have experienced will not return. Memories can be more deceptive than anything: as soon as they suggest the truth, they withdraw leaving a shadow, and vanish again, like a rapid passing of clouds. We must learn to remember: that memory is feeling.
The history of my family in the last century is closely intertwined with the migratory movements and the war events that affected the Italian people during the twentieth century. Pivotal figures of this story are a maternal ancestor and a paternal one: one who fled from the fire in Smyrna during the Greek- Turkish war in 1922, in which tens of thousands of people died and forced ten thousand Italians to flee, the other forced to emigrate to Brazil alter World War Il, going and swelling the ranks of what would become the largest Italian community abroad. One officer from the Navy, the other from the Air Force. Moved by the desire to pull the strings that bind me to those roots, I began to collect testimonies, photographs, postcards, letters, and oral memories through which I could approach facts, places and men I could not personally know. Before me the documents appear as pieces of a lost mosaic: some are brilliant, others eroded by time, while others still, with no apparent connections, appear incongruous, perhaps even extraneous. The inescapable impulse is to suppose, imagine, invent, and narrate.
Family albums are a marvelous treasure chest of memories. There, page after page, photo after photo, the passage of what we have been converging and leafing through it means embarking on a journey where the temporal dimension vanishes: the present is undermined, and the past comes back to life. However, the flow of images, the appearance in a sequence of people, faces the pose of a moment, is always accompanied by a pitfall that wishes to be overcome, because the memory of past things often doesn’t coincide with what it was.
With this project, I tried to proceed silently along the steep ridge between memory and identity, with discretion and elegance, with the modesty of someone who offers their research, their history, and their identity to others.
Azimuths of Celestial Bodies is a visual journal, an illustrated topography of the autobiographic journey undertaken to explore my own geography.
