During the first lockdown in March 2020, I started re-looking through my family albums prompted by the fear to not be able to physically share love and collect new memories of affection with my loved ones. The first chapter of this ongoing project Auguri di ogni bene (Best wishes) is a research through gestures of love from my childhood. These are pictures with a therapeutic and cathartic purpose, a study for exploration and reconciliation with past events and belonging.
Love and sorrow always share a place in those photos, where blood-bonds also signify understanding family dynamics and karmic tendencies. These are things that never leave, memories only can narrate and re-narrate those stories trying to accept and sometimes make relevant some memories and delete others, as simple as it is to throw some photos away and hang others on a wall.
Ilaria Sponda is an Italian visual artist, writer and curator based between Lisbon and Dublin. Through the use of different languages she explores the intersection between individual identity and the other than self. To better comprehend humans’ understanding of themselves in relation to life and nature, her research is rooted in the phenomenological, sometimes spanning from scientific theory to theological ideology. She often incorporates collected archival or natural materials in her pieces inviting new meaning to be formed through metaphors and subjectivity.
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