Visual Memory

If “Return to Life” tore objects from the ruins to bring them back to life in the studio, “The Visual Memory” does the opposite: it leaves the objects where they are and turns them into screens.

The idea behind this second act, created in 1999, is that things retain the imprint of what they have seen. It is not us who project memories onto them. It is they who return their lived experience to us.

Poggioreale thus reclaims its history tragically interrupted in January ‘68.

Ferreri completely changes his photographic approach. No longer still lifes in the studio, but three-dimensional installations created both among the ruins and in the studio, using the “emulsion lift”: the detachment of the Polaroid photographic gelatin and its transfer, like a second kin, directly onto the surface of the object.

The terracotta floor shows the image of the hobnailed boots that trampled it. The seat of a Thonet chair returns the image of a walled-up door invaded by weeds. A yellowed tray fills again with the Martorana fruit it held for thirty years. A fragment of stucco frame retains the image of the woman frescoed on the ceiling of the same hall. The glass of a window on Corso Umberto still reflects the facade of the church opposite, even though the church is no longer there. The white tiles of a kitchen bring back to light the crumpled paper of Wonson soap.

Between the folds, tears and transparencies of the peeled Polaroid, the memory appears and takes shape. The object is no longer represented by photography. It is photography that inhabits the object, transporting it into a new linguistic system. An icon of a memory that has never faded.