I used to
(2012)
The project is about an obsessive return to the past, about the luminous clarity of childhood, the fleeting turbulence of adolescence, and the way memory shifts under the weight of emotion. It investigates the fragile objectivity of time, acknowledging how recollections become distorted, softened, or intensified as they resurface. A sudden scent, a distant sound, or an unexpected texture becomes the catalyst for a pleasant disquiet, triggering memories once held at the edges of consciousness.
Developed through an imagined return to the artist’s childhood landscapes in Sardinia, the project combines these reconstructed places with vernacular family photographs and scanned pages from personal diaries. This assemblage produces memories that are only partially true: they merge lived experience with the imaginary and intertwine with fragments of narratives belonging to people close to the artist. As a result, the work generates an emotional space where individual recollections overlap, making it impossible to distinguish personal memory from that of parents, friends, or relatives.
Ultimately, the project examines self-knowledge through the lens of remembrance while reflecting on the transience of time as lived duration. By blending conscious and unconscious imagery and allowing instinct to override linear logic, the work seeks to evoke a formative state of life – one in which memory, perception, and imagination coexist in continual transformation.