From the very title Atlas, it is possible to understand the connection that bounds Alessandra Baldoni's research to the renowned Bilderatlas by the art historian Aby Warburg: atlas of images, dedicated to Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, in which the German scholar investigated survivals and permanence, latencies and comebacks in the western figurative art. The work of this author is also connected to the great artist Gerhard Richter and to his Atlas (work in progress since 1962), where he brings together pictures found and taken by himself, sketches and newspaper cuttings, creating new references and connections that mingle different temporal dimensions. But still Alessandra Baldoni does not follow an anthropological and historiographical approach as Warburg does: starting by existing images, he reconnected them following a dialogical logic based on survivals. She has not even got an encyclopedic classification aptitude: she does not want to organize and classify but she wants to create new combinations which give new life to the relationship between present and past, stories and experiences, nature and inner reality. The pictures, organized in diptychs and triptychs, are not just found, but created. They are displayed as a work of consideration and imagination, of research and recovery. They are the result of a free and unrestricted visual strategy, where a direct and documentary image can stay next to another one born of a carefully constructed scene; a photograph shot in a natural history museum finds itself near the one of a cloudy landscape, and the figure of a stuffed bird stands next to a detail of a painting... She creates a collection made of emotions, a branched map, with layers of analogies able to evoke states of mind, dreams and memories floating between astonishment and concern, turmoil and bewitchment. Alessandra Baldoni's pictures stand out to our gaze as essential and evocative ones, because of their magical and disturbing strength. Pervaded by a subtle anxiety, they build a kind of constellation where each piece refers to another without transforming into an accurate and comprehensible narration. In the racket of communication, the voice of her works does not impose itself with the noisy force of obviousness, but thanks to a murmured and penetrating tone which brings them away from any easy interpretation and it transforms them into a device that sways between revelations and hidings, appearances and concealment. Like fragments suspended in an extended out-dated time, her photographs seem to hesitate along a border line where the past intertwine with the present, where life, fiction, art, silence, landscapes, nature, experience, dreams and memories interlace. Each image is a mysterious and whispered micro-story which links to another one through underlying and persistent assonance and similarities. In other words each photograph seems to resemble to the line of a poem rhyming with another line and perhaps with a further one. Alessandra Baldoni's images never have an ending, as it happens in Sharazād's stories, but there is a sort of interruption/opening towards other journeys of imagination, to other possible narrations that venture into the recesses of memory and move forward into the future. Therefore her photographs compose a sort of mapping in progress of a world made of juxtapositions and subdermal connections, loaded of references and echoes in tension with each other. They are a journey among the hidden and forgotten correspondences between man and nature, between a persistent past and a suspended present which is not today nor the day before yesterday. She uses her images like tarot playing cards: each picture, next to another one, suggests new interpretative readings, new lines of thought. We can never get to an ultimate truth: they offer themselves as riddles to be queried, as invitations to recover inner paths, almost as if they were secrets exposed. by Gigliola Foschi