To You, My Sweetest Memory Forgotten
by Giuseppe Sannino
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2025', 2025
Category: Anthropology and Territories
To You, My Sweetest Memory Forgotten is a photographic project made in Picinisco, a mountain village in southern Italy where my family originates. The work unfolds within a landscape shaped by repetition: seasons, labor, and weather. Life here is organised around gestures learned early and carried from one generation to the next.
The photographs focus on local sheep herders and villagers, men whose bodies move in close continuity with the land. Their actions are simple, precise, and guided by necessity rather than expression. Speech is scarce. Meaning resides in rhythm, stone, and the relationships between humans and animals.
In this space, the closeness to nature is unmistakable, expressed through the villagers’ profound connection to the land and the cyclical patterns of daily life.
Review by URBANAUTICA
What does it mean to belong to a place? And how do we recognise ourselves in a landscape, measure the distance that separates us from it, or the closeness that ties us to a land, a history, a memory?Belonging is perhaps one of the key words through which Sannino’s work can be approached. Photography becomes a way of developing relationships with things, with signs, fragments, views, gestures, and with the people who inhabit a land. His photographs do not simply show or represent a place. They speak of the relationship that emerges between the photographer and the place itself. This is interesting to consider in the light of the way quantum physics has challenged the idea of a world made up of objects that exist completely independently of the observer. Without trying to transfer these concepts directly into photography, there is nevertheless something suggestive in the comparison: things acquire meaning, for us, through the relationships we establish with them. Photography is, by its very nature, a practice of looking and relating. It does not only show us places; it shows us different ways of looking at them, of moving through them, understanding them, longing for them.
Sannino’s work is also introspective. And it is no coincidence that his images often have this uncertain grain, the quality of a gaze not yet resolved, one that keeps chasing. The utterly intimate series “Imperfections” speaks for itself right from the title. And this is also evident when the photographer faces his memory. Memory is fragile. It crumbles before our eyes. It changes and shifts every time we return to it. It is not a fixed archive of the past, but something that continues to happen in the present. Looking at the work "Reminescence", for example, we encounter photographs from his family. The past becomes alive again precisely at the moment when he establishes a relationship with it through the camera. And through memory, we inevitably come face to face with loss. To remember is also to recognise what is no longer there, what has changed, what survives only as an image, a feeling, a fragment.
Fragmentation is another thread running through Sannino’s work. The photographs that make up his different series are only fragments of a larger vision. They are also, in a way, daydreams, reveries. There is no complete or definitive way of seeing things, because things take shape for us in the moment we look at them. This is particularly poignant in the series "The Reveries", an homage to the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his final promenades before his death, around his refuge in the grounds of Château d’Ermenonville. I somehow missed that book, and I will certainly look for it now. Perhaps this is another quality of photography: that one image can lead us towards another image, one place towards another place, one memory towards another.
Sannino’s photographs can also be thought of as traces, or footprints, that we leave behind. A possible confirmation of our having been here, a small form of insurance against disappearance. I was reminded of this while looking at the photographs in "Impronte nel Tempo: Svelando i Segreti dei Fenici". The project began with a field survey of the ruins of a Phoenician kiln that survived for more than 2,400 years. From the remains, fragments of clay were recovered, each one revealing a face, a relational possibility. A fragment again. Every fragment becomes a note, part of what Sannino describes as a kind of “visual symphony travelling across the centuries.” It made me wonder whether the photographs we leave behind, if they were ever to survive as those fragments in the ancient Phoenician kiln have survived, might one day become the pieces of a score of lived life. A trace that someone, centuries from now, might try to play.
With "Landscapes" Sannino also reminds us that places preserve traces of our presence. They carry the marks of the communities and living beings that inhabit them, work them, cross them, transform them, and constantly alter their shape and character. Landscape is therefore also a mirror: it tells us something about who we are and who we have been. Perhaps the photographer’s act of moving through it is also a way of thinking about what we might become. Landscape, once again, is memory. But it is a memory that comes into being when we look at it. There is therefore no single landscape, but many possible ways of understanding, crossing, shaping, and dreaming it. To reduce a landscape to a static postcard is, in this sense, almost absurd. It turns something alive and changing into a fixed image, often serving those who benefit from imposing one particular idea of what a landscape should look like, while leaving other ways of seeing it aside.
This is where "To You, My Sweetest Memory Forgotten" seems to me to bring many of these thoughts together. Sannino returns to Picinisco, a mountain village in southern Italy where his family originates. Here, the landscape is shaped by repetition, and life follows a pattern in which gestures are passed from one generation to the next. The shepherds and villagers become part of a system of relationships in which gestures are guided by necessity and, as the photographer writes, by little speech. Meaning seems to live instead in rhythm, in stone, in animals, in the repetition of actions that embody a particular relationship with the land.
In this setting, Sannino leaves his own trace. He establishes a relationship with the place and with the people he encounters, and it is through this relationship that things come into being before our eyes, in the very moment we engage with them, as I did. "To You, My Sweetest Memory Forgotten" can therefore be seen as a work about memory as much as about belonging, loss, and persistence. Memory is not something we keep intact, but something that continues to change every time we return to look at it, or even to question it.