Latente

As a reciprocal gift, my aunt Paola, who couldn’t have children, took on the role of mother when I lost mine at 17. With her, I learned to live without fear, until her stomach cancer confronted me again with the idea of losing a maternal figure for a second time.

Faced with something that breaks us, emotions take unexpected forms. On the day I was told her death was imminent, without planning to, I went out with my camera and documented my afternoon. There was no documentary intention or clear purpose; later I understood the need to look at myself from the outside during one of the most painful stages of my life.

With time and distance, those images gave me back something unexpected: I could recognize myself in them and decipher a pain that no one else would be able to read there. Giving meaning to these photos became an act of compassion and truce with myself, within a grief that remains open.

Latente explores that contradictory space where life and death coexist: the absence of a script, the voids that are neither filled nor put on display, and the way the everyday, the absurd, and the seemingly inappropriate are all part of the experience of loss.