“’Radici’(roots in italian) is a journey that explores an ancestral relation between nature, shapes and memories”. Italian photographer Fabrizio Albertini displays memories as the substance of the present, physical shapes as the struggle against deformation, and nature as embodying such effort.
For this series, Fabrizio went back to the Cannobina Valley, in northern Italy, where his family is from, and where he spent summer holidays as a kid. “I needed to work on my present, and (his past) was the best place to start from” he tells us. The consubstantiality of past and present is in fact one of the underlying themes of this work. “Roots are the lives of trees. Roots have an extraordinary strength. Roots move the ground, make their way through the soil.”
Keeping a form
The subject -matter of“Radici” is diverse. Portraits, landscapes, still lives and archive images compose a heterogeneous unity. The path Fabrizio intends to draw is intentionally symbolic; it is the act of dusting off the way back to memories. The evocative nature of his work leaves room for everyone’s interpretation, but we can spot in every picture a detail that recalls the inner struggle of roots. The people portrayed in his series embody such strife. They all have marks, on their skin or on their posture -that show what Fabrizio calls “The conflict and the coexistence between keeping a form or being deformed.”
He says that his rapprochement to memories is not merely photographic. This series responds to a need to relive both the physical and the mental spaces of his past. He went back to his grandparents’ house “That looked suspended in time. I felt the need to go back, to dust off those places.” Fabrizio says the Cannobina Valley is almost dead now, but in his work we can see a powerful vital impulse, a hot map that quivers under the skin, in the subsoil.
Images from “Radici” © Fabrizio Albertini
