MEMENTO - working title -

Can a single photograph represent a whole life? How can we be remembered in a single image? This project selects and reinterprets the photographs found on graves at the Certosa Cemetery in Bologna. It began as a total chance encounter during a visit to the cemetery in April 2025. I was struck by the presence of photographs on every single grave. In order to document them, I photographed these images in situ. I realized that this act echoed my passion of finding and collecting vernacular photographs on flea markets. Both is an intuitive search that deals with repositories of the past, personal memory and collective storytelling. These grave photographs reveal intimate narratives of identity, culture, family, social belonging and emotions. They reflect how individuals and communities choose to represent themselves after death, raising questions about memory, legacy, and self-representation. Bologna has a rich political history and a significant landmark position in education as well as the arts. These images offer a unique perspective on 20th-century Northern Italy, showing emotion, humor, devotion, and the enduring importance of family bonds. At the same time, the project resonates with contemporary concerns: in an era of mass photography and digital memorialization, it examines how images continue to shape our understanding of presence, absence, and identity in public and private spaces. Artistically, the project observes the photographs as aesthetic objects with their own poetics. I imagine an edition of these pictures alongside an essay. I would like to remove the pictures from the contextual cues of the cemetery so that viewers first encounter the images visually, before recognizing their source, prompting reflection on how context shapes perception. The project will culminate in an edition plus an exhibition with a critical essay, presenting the photographs alongside an interpretive commentary that situates them in broader debates on vernacular photography, memory, and contemporary visual culture. Memento is both an observational and an analytical project: it explores human attempts at representation and remembrance while creating a dialogue between past and present, personal and collective, ordinary and extraordinary, presence and absence.