Sabina Damiani

I was interested in exploring the effects of cultural and political conditioning and processes that affects the creation of  memory. While walking through the city of Daugavpils, southeastern Latvia, I have created a connection with the collective memory I shared with the inhabitants of this place. I focused on children's playgrounds as the games happened to be very similar to the ones we used to have as kids, and that were later replaced with modern, plastic ones. While rethinking about games from childhood we used to play it was impossible to recall their rules or ways of playing them, leaving me only with the reminiscence of strong feelings, like the smell of rust and steel on the hands, the cold from the metal and the bright colours of the paint. In this moment of déjà vu I figured how collective remembering often lead to collective amnesia. Enlarging a detail to the point where the sign itself disappears is a way to regain the focus on that very detail, on an isolated feeling that later enlarges slowly to makes us see the bigger picture. By enlarging parts of color and rust, working on their overlapping and focusing on a not always recognizable detail, I wanted to analyse the amnesia, when the only thing we remember are just certain feelings or fragments, solicited by what we see or hear or smell. The surroundings offered a monochromatic, silent landscape, interrupted only by sporadic batches of bright colours and very isolated proofs of human activity. A topography of real artefacts is conducting us into a circle of thoughts and without offering any definitive answers, making us approach to the archipelago of the world.