Mnemosyne explores the construction of memory, its literal unveiling in the visual act, reflecting on relationships of identity and origin. Attempts to investigate the past through the recovery of visual archives (family / iconological) open up unexpected scenario: objects, gestures, colors, texts, documents, produce "open-images", anachronistic, polychronic, that they bring to light the relationship between image and experience.
Mnemosyne digs into a parallel history that finds its origin in the long illness and consequent loss of the author's father. «In those five years of struggle, when life has worn out so quickly, I started reflecting on the labile memory systems. Memory has to do with images, and memory exists only when someone practises it but like photography, it produces something imprecise, fallacious».
Knowing personal point of view in the history of the images that belong to us, becomes a condition of essential honesty to face a profound critical sense.
A trace collection operation begins. Through the strength of a transversal knowledge it is possible to discover links that direct observation is unable to grasp.
Claudia Iacomino's work is composed like a visual Atlas. it follows a fragmentary narrative, made up of references and visual connections that begin with the scanning of his father's analog archives, interlacing the scannings with “collateral photographs”: pictures with a therapeutic and cathartic purpose, a study for exploration and reconciliation with oneself with oneself which one can find a story, far from being an individual one but more as a common, collective and recurrent grief.
Mnemosyne, Greek Goddess of Memory and mother of the Muses, is also the title of the artwork by Aby Warburg from which this work takes inspiration from, especially for its historical-visual approach, favoring the idea that Memory is anything but something static that must be transmitted by ceremony, but rather an emotional activator capable of triggering powerful chemical reactions in reality. In other words, able of creating beauty.