Sicilia, 2020-2021.

The series Courtesies for Guests is built from 25 images and 3 videos where time and space of the protagonists merge, creating new memory. The guests are in a precise space but they are not defined in a precise time. Through an “analogue” superimposition of old advertising slides I made an imaginary journey inside the house with these unusual and unexpected guests. The starting point of the series is the discovery of an archive of my father, hundreds of slides from a newspaper in Lausanne, Switzerland (the place where I was born), and others from various markets. All this material has always been kept together along with slides of birthdays, weddings and moments of my family and moments of my family, preserved with the same love.

In 2020, where particularly stringent decrees did not allow the possibility of having guests in the house, I hosted these strangers, who as intruders had already infiltrated my personal memories, but through this connection now I got a new image, a new memory, of a past and a present
merging. All photographs are taken from a cell phone in order to emphasize the instantaneousness of the medium, which contrasts with the materiality of the slide object, which thus loses all its formal characteristics and acquires new ones.

The subjects of the past are superimposed on an environment that casts doubt on time, precisely because of its objects.
its objects, the picture, the stove, the kitchen, everything recalls a non-modern environment and blends perfectly with the slide. In none of the images do we see the character in focus precisely because it is his shadow that marks the presence, the shadow is a trace and by its very nature as Rosalind Krauss states, even photography is a shadow. This shadow is the physicality not of reality as such, but of a fragment of reality, whose appearance presupposes a choice, an interpretation.