The Poetics of Absence

The theme of travel is strictly connected to that of separation, of disruption and of the inevitability of making farewells. The reverse of these feelings is the attempt to neutralize the evidence of severance through a series of stratagems perfected over the millennial history of humanity. Photography in particular has a privileged position among the expedients recently adopted to minimize the effects of nostalgia, and as absurd as it might seem, also in order to increase those same effects.

We carry images in order to have a physical “objective” reminder of places and individuals of high emotional relevance whose memory we cannot allow to fade or dissolve. Documentarism, photographic archives

and artistic photography seem to share a deep interest in the collection of visual relics, although their treatment dramatically changes moving on a line that starts with preservation and reaches re-elaboration and interpretation.