By using photographs, archive documents and digital technologies, Domenico Camarda, Francesco Levy and Alba Zari tackle the complex issue of identity, retracing their own family and personal history. A process of rediscovering one’s origins in which photography, just like memory, turns out to be a document subject to interpretation as well as manipulation.
Domenico Camarda
LIQUIDO
The concept of identity, like reality itself, has multiplied, has become expanded, losing defined traits. Fixity is replaced by a variety of possible forms. Everything can be constructed and deconstructed as we please, but the flipside of this is a society which is committed to individualism ever-more; where social ties are becoming liquid and instable. In the contemporary Western world, society, as a human network of relationships, has become fragile: the individual, distant from others, is left free to assert herself but lacks any reference points to use as guidance or to identify with.
Each person is thus liquid.It is an entity that can not have its own form, but assumes the one of the ‘recipient’ that contains it at the moment. Therefore an individuality in constant mutation, capable of finding itself anywhere, but unable to stay in any place for long.
Francesco Levy
AZIMUTHS OF CELESTIAL BODIES
Many are the ways to tell a story and just as many are the ways to lie in the process. Mine is through a journey within the stories and people of my family core. A stream of lives now flowed into me: the last of my kin.
The common thread of my story are the great wars that upset Europe during the last century, along with the grim background and prime mover of the migrations that allowed the paths to intertwine. A story which is a dissertation on lineage, linking together what is with what has been: a restitution of memories that have been passed down to me, which I have made mine and freely reinterpreted. It is a visual journal, an illustrated topography of the autobiographic journey undertaken to explore my own geography.
Alba Zari
THE Y
Every woman inherits two X chromosomes, one of which can be paternal. Alba Zari uses the medium of photography as a visual method of investigation, writing self-analysis notes to research the father that she never met. The missing Y. She goes into a process of self transformation where the results of the research can modify the perception of her identity. A deep research of her origins and she documents it with scientific rigor and in real time through specific photographic methods and languages.
Photography becomes a concrete investigative medium that will be useful to research evidence and proofs.
